[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]
This week has been Social Media Week with events taking place in over twenty cities around the world. No-one can hope to take it all in, but I've done my best to keep abreast of the themes, big and small.
But there was one thing I was keenly looking out for yet did not see. If you did, please let me know. Machined media – or at least that's my term for it.
I define machined media as content that's automatically discovered, presented and published by machines for humans, and I introduced it at last year's CIPR Social Media conference.
Machined media has had a fairly ignominious start in life. Anyone online will have stumbled across it. You will have seen some weird looking text in spam emails, and spam websites just looking for any and all traffic they can entice a search engine to send their way. The text has been generated automatically to try to by-pass spam filters, and then to encourage you to click so the spammers make money. The content hasn't had to aspire to Shakespearean fluency because one click in a million will do just fine thank you very much.
But semi-machined media has entered prime time, and pure machined media is on the cusp. Read more