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How the Sausage Gets Made: The Hidden Work of Content

74 points by kawera 9y ago

ptaipale 9y ago
I thought the story headline would draw from the famous quote misattributed to Bismarck: "Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made." Perhaps the same applies sometimes to Web content.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  It basically applies to anything.
  - booleandilemma 9y ago
    If our clients saw how much googling we do...
SyneRyder 9y ago
Note that in this article, content is defined as "scraping, scrubbing, copying, or pasting". It's about content curation, not so much content creation. That said, it's a good article on the work that goes into curation, and API frustrations leading to manual workflows.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >It's about content curation, not so much content creation. That covers 90% of the content out there on the web today...
tomcam 9y ago
Article does not mention rights clearance, which is surprising, since the content wasn’t created for that site.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
The article plays a bit fast and loose with a well known reference and apparently chose it in part because a critical detail of the award winning work was keeping dick pics out of the food feed. Sausage works decently here as an analogy for grinding up the "meat" of content, adding some spice, cooking it and getting it to work as a cohesive whole when it is really a bunch of cobbled together parts. I can relate to her description of automagically. When I had a corporate job, they introduced a means to fast track your file by submitting it online instead of by fax. They promised a faster turn around time for online files. I worked on that team for a bit. The back-end experience, where real people scrambled to review the files and make this online submission magic happen, reminded me of the scene in Men in Black 2 where they open up an automatic mail sorting machine and inside is a guy with multiple arms sorting the mail at high speed. Rode: What looks like The Jetsons on the outside often resembles The Flintstones if you open it up and peer inside.

74 points by kawera 9y ago

I thought the story headline would draw from the famous quote misattributed to Bismarck: "Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made." Perhaps the same applies sometimes to Web content.

digi_owl 9y ago
It basically applies to anything.
- booleandilemma 9y ago
  If our clients saw how much googling we do...

SyneRyder 9y ago

Note that in this article, content is defined as "scraping, scrubbing, copying, or pasting". It's about content curation, not so much content creation. That said, it's a good article on the work that goes into curation, and API frustrations leading to manual workflows.

coldtea 9y ago
>It's about content curation, not so much content creation. That covers 90% of the content out there on the web today...

tomcam 9y ago

Article does not mention rights clearance, which is surprising, since the content wasn’t created for that site.

DoreenMichele 9y ago

The article plays a bit fast and loose with a well known reference and apparently chose it in part because a critical detail of the award winning work was keeping dick pics out of the food feed. Sausage works decently here as an analogy for grinding up the "meat" of content, adding some spice, cooking it and getting it to work as a cohesive whole when it is really a bunch of cobbled together parts. I can relate to her description of automagically. When I had a corporate job, they introduced a means to fast track your file by submitting it online instead of by fax. They promised a faster turn around time for online files. I worked on that team for a bit. The back-end experience, where real people scrambled to review the files and make this online submission magic happen, reminded me of the scene in Men in Black 2 where they open up an automatic mail sorting machine and inside is a guy with multiple arms sorting the mail at high speed. Rode: What looks like The Jetsons on the outside often resembles The Flintstones if you open it up and peer inside.