Curation – The latest in internet buzz

I unfortunately was not able to attend Affiliate Summit West (ASW). I did however watch a lot of the videos, see the pictures and read the blog posts. Thanks so much to those who provided coverage of the event. It seems like a great event!

ASW all kicked off with a somewhat controversial keynote speech by Jason Calacanis on Affiliate Spam. Pretty brave at an affiliate marketing conference.

The gist of it
His major point was that most affiliate marketers were creating low quality but very high SEO value websites which were dominating search results. These sites were merely funnels pushing people towards buying products in order for the marketer to earn a commission. Jason essentially called affiliate marketers out for spamming search results pages reducing their quality and value for the end user. This is short sighted. The phrases Jason used to describe this practice were poisoning the well and polluting the river where the well and the river are the internet that we all need and use on such a regular basis.

This is a very good point and the industry’s lack of a governing body or any real guidelines have let marketers to plague search engines with their landing pages. In an ideal world, marketers would all focus on creating quality resources which add value. At the minute the focus of many is on so called thin affiliate sites which are simple the aforementioned landing pages funneling people towards the point of sale.

The problem
The problem is that this is not an ideal world. Much like the paid back link situation, if you don’t do it, someone else will. If you stop creating thin affiliate sites and start working on larger quality projects, someone else will be cashing in on those affiliate offers.

The result of the continued growth in affiliates pushing low quality sites with no goal other than to convert paid traffic into sales into search engine results pages will be of ever decreasing value. Affiliate marketers are some of the cleverest and hardest working people out there. Their knowledge of SEO is pretty much unbeatable. Eventually a Google search of something will yield nothing but affiliate landing pages. This makes it useless. Jason makes this point, and compares it to the decline of Usenet and sites such as Squidoo which suffered from being spammed to death.

The solution can be summarised into one word: Curation.

What is curation?
Curation essentially means maintaining, curing, healing and that type of thing. How does this apply to search engines? Well in the case of Mahalo – a new search engines owned by Calacanis, it means human processing of every page. This is the only true way of filtering out all spammy websites and making sure only the most important and relevant websites rank. This way when you search for hotels in Paris you will get great resources regarding hotels in Paris, as opposed to hundreds of travel sites packed with spammy offers and not giving you any real information such as contact numbers.

Other examples include the move from MySpace where loads of profiles can be created and it is full of spam to the likes of Facebook (though the rapid increase in numbers of applications has made it more spammy) and LinkedIn, where only real profiles are allowed. Here spam is reduced as people are held accountable.

Does this digital curation make business sense?
Well we shall have to see. It looks to me like it will. Jason Calacanis made a direct comparison to the move in food production from almost industrial mass production techniques to the free range and organic methods. In this case it has been proven, people are willing to pay the premium for a better quality product and a clearer conscience.

My conclusion
As bloggers we always talk about “adding value”. There is no reason why business should not be done with a clear conscience. The emphasis on being social is evolving into doing things for the greater good. There will always be someone out for a quick buck though.

Unless Google can find a way to keep on top of things then I can see the likes of Mahalo increasing in popularity. A human powered search engine is going to severely struggle to process the sheer volume of content the internet produces, so their functionality is going to be very limited for the majority of users for the foreseeable future.

Accountability for ones actions is something I can see developing very strongly. Anonymity affects peoples judgements, and when money is involved, the effects are rarely positive. At the same time, this will be countered by those who want privacy and are totally against a big brother type society.

Links and credits
Listen to Jason’s keynote speech at WebmasterRadio.FM or download it

Jason’s follow up on his blog

Photo by affiliatesummit (From left to right, Missy Ward, Jason Calacanis, Shawn Collins)

Your thoughts
There is no doubt there is a lot of food for thought there. How do you feel about curation? Is it the direction we are heading in?