Arianna Huffington’s next million mark by Ken Doctor.
From the post:
Before the end of this year, HuffPost will release new tech and a new app, opening the floodgates for contributors. The goal: Add 900,000 contributors to Huffington Post’s 100,000 current ones. Yes, one million in total.
How fast would Arianna like that to get that number?
“One day,” she joked, as we discussed her latest project, code-named Donatello for the Renaissance sculptor. Lots of people got to be Huffington Post contributors through Arianna Huffington. They’d meet her at book signing, send an email and find themselves hooked up. “It’s one of my favorite things,” she told me Thursday. Now, though, that kind of retail recruitment may be a vestige.
“It’s been an essential part of our DNA,” she said, talking about the user contributions that once seemed to outnumber the A.P. stories and smaller original news staff’s work. “We’ve always been a hybrid platform,” a mix of pros and contributors.
So what enables the new strategy? Technology, naturally.
HuffPost’s new content management system is now being extended to work as a self-publishing platform as well. It will allow contributors to post directly from their smartphones, and add in video. Behind the scenes, a streamlined approval system is intended to reduce human (editor) intervention. Get approved once, then publish away, “while preserving the quality,” Huffington added.
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Adding another 900,000 contributors to the Huffington Post is going to bump their content production substantially.
So, here’s the question: Searching the Huffington Post site is as bad as most other media sites. What is adding content from another 900,000 contributors going to do for that experience? Get worse? That’s my first bet.
On the other hand, what if authors can unknowingly create topic maps? For example, auto-tagging offers Wikipedia links (one or more) for an entity in a story, for relationships, a drop down menu with roles for the major relationship types (slept-with being available for inside the Beltway), with auto-generated relationships to the author, events mentioned, other content at the Huffington Post.
Don’t solve the indexing/search problem after the fact, create smarter data up front. Promote the content with better tagging and relationships. With 1 million unpaid contributors trying to get their contributions noticed, a win-win situation.