Emmett Butler is a web and video game developer and an NYU senior studying computer science and music technology. In this post, he reflects on his time as an intern at Parse.ly

Today, I leave Parse.ly after 20 months of work that took me from writing web scrapers to diving deep into semantic web standards to designing mobile SDKs. Here is some advice and emotional primer for the incoming Parse.ly intern. I can only speak from my own experience, and while I try to generalize, all of my advice is heavily colored by what I went through when I started.

When I started at Parse.ly, I was working 20 hours a week alongside another part-time work study job. I was entering my 3rd year of an NYU double music technology/cs degree, and my technical skills were rudimentary. I had no “real world” experience to speak of, and the extent of my outside experience was a few hackathons, schoolwork, and a handful of personal projects. I actually remember thinking during my first few weeks at Parse.ly that I had no idea what I was doing - I didn’t delude myself.

In the course of my time here, I’ve gone from mechanically writing 4-6 web crawler scripts per day to developing semantic web tools and mobile SDKs for Parsely’s customers, as well as contributing to the main analytics product, Dash. I gained experience in most of Parse.ly’s codebases circa mid-2012, primarily as a result of my own exploration. I personally feel that I’ve come a long way.

Parse.ly was both my first “real” job and my first time collaborating with other professional developers. Knowing that I was extremely inexperienced, it was easy to assume that everyone else on the team had all of the answers. In my mind, there was no question I could ask the other developers that would challenge them - the rest of the team was light years beyond me as far as I was concerned. This was my mindset for probably the first 2 or 3 months I spent at Parse.ly, and it didn’t really change until I had done something I saw as substantial enough to warrant being taken seriously by anyone else. Of course, this is a poisonous mindset and it can (and did) lead to all kinds of negative emotions and behaviors. Primarily, it stopped me from contributing meaningfully to discussions, since I was convinced that I had nothing to offer.

What I came to realize about this mindset is that it is (obviously?) not founded in fact. I’m sure this realization is something everyone has to go through at some point or another, but the most important thing for me to personally understand was that there is no worldwide programmer race. I am prone to operate under the assumption that there is a race going on between all programmers in the world to see who can be the “best” the fastest, and I’m losing. The fact is that nobody actually thinks this way about anyone other than themselves - everyone is worried about their own skills, but they don’t spend time comparing other people.

The point is that everyone has their own expertise and skillset, and it’s very unlikely (no matter how much you want to believe it) that the sum of your own knowledge is fully duplicated across the rest of the Parse.ly team. You know something someone else doesn’t, and this simple fact invalidates the “race” idea. Skill sets are vectors, not scalars - you can’t just “rank” people based on the entirety of what they know or don’t know.

The upshot for me was to stop comparing myself to other developers, especially the Parse.ly team. There is nothing to be gained from worrying about “how good you are”.

As for contributing to discussions, I think about it like this: you are very familiar with yourself. You probably have a constant internal monologue in which you acknowledge your own thoughts about the discussions and teams activity happening around you. You’re comfortable with this. If you’re anything like me, you tend to forget that other people (especially people who don’t know you very well) are not familiar with your internal monologue. To me, it seemed that the worst consequence of not contributing to discussions was having to go along with whatever decisions were made. It turns out, though, that since the rest of the team doesn’t hear your thoughts, the worst consequence is, in the long term, gaining a reputation on the team as unengaged. This applies, as far as I can tell, to any tech team, not just Parse.ly. If you don’t actively contribute in group settings, people may see you as unengaged, or they might give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’re still paying attention. If you do contribute, though, you remove all doubt as to whether you care about being a productive team member. Ultimately, contributing to conversations is bound to make you look better, not worse.

My first project at Parse.ly was the data exporting feature (what became Dash’s “save page as” buttons). My first day was consumed by haphazardly setting up virtualenv, python, pip, mongodb, postgres, and dash on my laptop, and the assignment came on my second day (in my experience, this is a typical timeline for Parse.ly interns). The environment setup consisted mostly of Andrew guiding me through the setup processes (which were at the time alien to me) over a google hangout. When Andrew told me my assignment, it was presented as a verbal list of customer-facing requirements and a few technical pointers (for example, “try using tablib for converting to CSV”).

I had no idea where to start. The project was an exercise in smart google searching and lots of trial and error. It felt weird at the time to be given a project that I would have to learn a lot to complete, and the distributed nature of the development team made it even more intimidating to ask for help when I needed it. A distributed team is a great environment for seasoned engineers to collaborate asynchronously, but it leaves something to be desired for a novice developer in the process of learning. In a non-distributed environment, I could lean over and ask another engineer to look something over or give a pointer - this becomes less natural when you’re collaborating over IRC.

As a result of the team’s geographic separation and my above-mentioned mental blocks, I learned how to figure things out for myself. I started spending more time searching online and participating in StackOverflow than I did wondering when some team member could find time to help me learn. Honestly, I think the distributed environment contributed positively to my learning, as it forced me to break out of the comfort of more experienced devs and learn to fend for myself, so to speak. If I wasn’t already an autodidact, I certainly became one around this time.

There is a lot that you can do as an incoming intern at Parse.ly to make the experience most worthwhile for yourself. Most importantly, learn how to teach yourself. Don’t let insecurity about your skills stop you from sharing your thoughts. React to intimidating projects with curiosity, not fear. Do not be afraid of this man, he is scarier than he looks. I mean, not as scary as he looks. He may be the most opinionated member of the Parse.ly team, but he will teach you to challenge your assumptions and defend your positions. Take every opportunity to learn bits of the codebase you’ve never seen before, in languages you’re unfamiliar with.

In short, do not let any real or perceived lack of expertise stop you from being the developer you can be. Contribute often, teach yourself whenever you can, and allow yourself to be supported by the amazing team you’re entering.

I’m more than happy to provide personal or techincal advice if you’re the target audience for this post. You can email me at emmett dot butler three 2 one at g mail dot com. (Change all number-words to digits and all “dot” to .)

Thanks to Andrew Montalenti, whose encouragement to self-reflection helped these thoughts crystallize.

Last week, BuzzFeed launched a new “community vertical” that hosts user-generated and curated content. The BuzzFeed community vertical follows on the heels of a Gawker Media project, Kinja, a combo blogging platform, social media interface, and forum built around Gawker’s various properties. Whereas the BuzzFeed’s community vertical encourages users to produce content for the site itself, Kinja is semi-segregated from Gawker’s actual sites. Instead of participating in content production, Kinja users create and curate from behind a partition. So does Kinja count as a community vertical?

Primed as a possible competitor to blogging platforms like Tumblr and Wordpress, Kinja started a solution to an age-old Internet problem: how to manage trolls. Gawker designed Kinja as a rebooted comment system. Faced with an uncontrollable population of malfeasant commenters, Gawker decided to disguise a few basic barriers to entry as a personalized profile cum social media plugin. Strip away anonymity and offer a pseudo-community, all in one stroke. If Kinja hasn’t conquered the Internet, it has improved the Gawker experience. Although obnoxious commenting doesn’t seem to have decreased much, extreme bullying, harassment, and spamming seem less common, at least from my anecdotal observations. The community seems to enforce a higher standard of conduct than in the former system, where anonymous, outrageous behavior was the norm.

Writing for Mediabistro, Karen Fratti is more skeptical about Kinja’s potential as a blogging platform. Fratti indicts both the quality of content and Gawker’s ulterior motives: monetization. But are monetization and authentic participation mutually exclusive? That is to say, is it impossible for a user to make a genuine contribution to Gawker’s content and for Gawker to monetize that contribution? No, and in fact, it is only natural that Gawker turns a profit on user-generated content. And just as the community seems to have established social norms for acceptable comments, hopefully that same community will determine editorial norms for good content.

Kinja is not a community vertical because it is too closely integrated with Gawker’s other content. Gawker’s new layout promotes a fuzziness between commenting and writing substantive material, and it can be unclear who is writing what, where, as Fratti notes. Yet Kinja’s translucency with “real” Gawker content might facilitate more sincere and enthusiastic participation than a boundaried community space, in which users feel like second-class citizens or factory labor pumping out short form stories. As Gawker and BuzzFeed continue to drift apart in style and strategy, either Kinja or the community vertical will emerge as a dominant model for user-generated content. Determining a victor will depend on a combination of user preferences and the ultimate possibilities for profit.

The biggest threat to professional journalists is neither declining ad revenues nor social media, but rather a growing realization that the public can generate content more efficiently and more profitably. 

On Wednesday, BuzzFeed launched a new section called “Community,” where users will contribute all of the content. As PaidContent points out, BuzzFeed has always encouraged users to submit material, and has thrived off of community publishing. But this new “vertical” brings user generated content into the spotlight, emphasizing the sustainability of an entirely user-powered platform. 

Community verticals threaten professional journalists because they cost the company nothing. Consider the case of, well, a lemonade stand. If my kid (note: I do not have a kid) hired strangers to mix up batches of lemonade, she would make less money than if she recruited her friends to squeeze lemons for free.

What of the quality, though? Maybe these strangers are really professional lemonade-experts equipped with secret recipes and special knowledge of the lemon-squeezing process. Perhaps their lemonade is more delicious, more refreshing, and marketable to a more upscale demographic. It’s true that user-generated content, in this tortured analogy the poor lemon drippings of the neighborhood gang, is rougher than the professional stuff. It cannot be marketed to the exact same audience. And BuzzFeed’s new vertical, unlike Reddit or other community networks, doesn’t make a play to traditional journalism. The product falls into the “cats doing funny things” bucket. Nevertheless, the kind of content featured on BuzzFeed will continue to marginalize stories framed by traditional journalistic paradigms. 

Despite the very real possibility that the decline of traditional journalism will impair democratic politics, it is more likely that community participation in journalism will enhance opportunities for political participation. If more conventional media companies also adopt community verticals, the voice of the people, however diversely composed, will become a legitimate source of commentary on the news. Instead of being filtered through institutions artificially committed to certain political positions, that voice will reach mass audiences—and perhaps itself—in a rawer form. Once we abandon our investment in the formal qualities of professional journalism so fundamental to its status as a commodity, we will be able to accept a community vertical as of equivalent value to the univocal journalist.

Click-through rates are abysmal. Readers are ignoring display ads. But there’s good news: advertising that looks and feels like editorial content is a proven way to engage audiences.

The content marketing era is upon us.

Content marketing might be easiest to define by what it isn’t. Content marketing doesn’t go after an immediate sale, or pitch a customer a product that they’ll purchase the next day. Instead, it’s about creating compelling content: stuff that potential customers want to read and share. The payoff? Something along the lines of brand awareness, brand loyalty, and brand trust—and in a time when Ad Age calls trust “the new currency of commerce,” it’s exactly what some advertisers are looking for.

But content marketing, in one form or another, has been around for a while. To use Inc.com’s examples: In-flight magazine? Content marketing. Michelin guides? Content marketing. Soap operas? If you were watching (or rather, listening) in the 1930s, you were engaging with content marketing. Today, you can see examples of content marketing hosted on a variety of sites, from The Atlantic to Forbes.com to Buzzfeed.

This is, perhaps counterintuitively, good news for publishers: Media sites are the sensible place for advertisers to promote their content—to get it exposed in the first place. Publishers (especially, nudge nudge, Dash users) know their audiences, and their audiences know what to expect on a publisher’s site. Smart advertisers will create or promote content that appeals to those audiences’ tastes. More often then not, well-placed content marketing will resemble what’s already on a media site, giving readers, listeners, and watchers more of what they’re already looking for—just provided by an advertiser.

That’s not to say content marketing isn’t controversial. Publishers are ethically bound, and “the difference between marketing and editorial content must be transparent,” according to the American Society of Magazine Editors. If an advertiser’s content is designed to be similar to a publisher’s, what does “transparency” entail? How can publishers make that distinction clear?

These are questions without clear answers, as evidenced by the countless “controversies” over sponsored, advertorial, or advertiser-produced content. Think Scientologate was a unique case? Think again. No seriously: think again.

We’re not going to pretend that we’ve got an easy answer. Even the specifics of ASME’s guidelines seem to boil down to the editorial version of “you know it when you see it.” What we do know is that we’ll be watching the content marketing debate closely—we’re pretty sure it’s here to stay.

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Attempts to explain viral content circle back to behavioral psychology and game theory. What “goes viral” and what doesn’t depends on a combination of taste-making celebrities, powerful users on content distribution platforms like YouTube and Twitter, market dynamics, and luck, or so we are told. But it’s worth thinking about virality as a phenomenon that passes through corporate media systems. That is, decision-making about what goes viral often devolves to individual editors at digital media companies. 

For example, a story on one of Columbia University’s campus news sites has been making the Internet rounds. Bwog published a pseudo-study of how many seniors at Columbia prefer cheese to oral sex. Amusing if ordinary stuff for Bwog, a site known for its irreverent humor and mild anti-institutional flavor. The article was by no means extraordinary or even unusual for Bwog, but Gothamist discovered it, perhaps by way of an alumni, and re-blogged it. Now, the Huffington Post, Complex, and MSN have aggregated the post. With hundreds of shares, the story continues to gain traction.

The regular migration of content from local channels to international media outlets demands a more complete accounting than game theoretical explanations. While individual editorial talents at those big media companies do rely on the crowd to source aggregate-able content, their decision-making processes are independent of pure democratic consensus. Indeed, as consumers, we expect editors to pluck interesting content we might not have encountered otherwise from the backwaters of the web. Yet we are also expected to participate in the “surfacing” of obscure content before it disappears into deep archives. Perhaps we should hold editorial teams more accountable for their contribution to virality.  

The only subject that attracted more media coverage than Boston last week was the media coverage of Boston. A media industry has grown around the media industry, like a system of surveillance cameras for a reality television show. “Media watchdog” now might mean a media group tasked with watching itself!  

In a world after Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, news is simultaneously produced and distributed on semi-interconnected channels. News is generated by traditional media corporations and shared across social media, even as social media generates its own news content and circulates conventional media products. The complicated exchange of information between corporate media entities and social media users creates its own searchable and durable archive, which in turn becomes the subject of redistribution through corporate and social media networks. Thus it has become easier for the media to conduct investigative journalism on itself, to report on its own practices, and to discipline itself. But is meta-muckraking healthy? Does it lead to real reforms or improvements in the ethics and efficiency of news journalism?

Meta-muckraking claims to cure a spiral away from “good” journalistic practices, or the rules that governed “how to write a news lead” circa 1950: get the facts right and get the facts right: be ethical and be accurate. According to its advocates, meta-muckraking exposes sleazy and reckless reporting habits—both on social media platforms and in news articles proper—and boosts the quality of journalism on the web. Public shaming is a first-resort, and its immediate effect is to transform the media industry into a spectacle.

Self-spectatorship reflects a narcissism buried deep in the heart of digital journalism, a desire to listen forever to one’s own voice. Yet meta-muckraking might reveal that pathology to itself. The patient, by conducting an auto-analysis, can diagnose its own ills. Is meta-muckraking a symptom of a disease that, in the moment of becoming-symptomatic, heals itself? Media coverage of the Boston attacks would suggest otherwise. With every passing tragedy, and there seems to have been an undue concentration this year, meta-muckraking increases in intensity. And with every passing tragedy, unethical and inaccurate reportage seems to increase, too. Either meta-muckraking is getting better at finding worst practices at work, or meta-muckraking is damaging the very institutional standards it intends to protect.

After a tragedy we feel compelled to build memorials, to remember what happened, and to make it all meaningful. Whether a monument at Auschwitz or Ypres, inscribed with what Siegfried Sassoon described as “intolerably nameless names,” we make our mourning something material to make it immortal. Oral tradition may decay and become corrupt but Arlington Cemetery lasts forever, or so we have convinced ourselves. With the aid of a memory palace, an AIDS quilt or a piece of the Berlin Wall, we can recall a terrible history we might otherwise be tempted to forget. And even once we have dismissed that fantasy of perfect remembrance, we persist in erecting the names of the fallen and the lost because we feel it is right and just. Memorials map out our cultural memory; they form a guide to our communities and create a sense of belonging. In turn, our culture demands the memorial as a kind of second skin, a raised tattoo that lets a community imagine its own flesh. There is an ethics of memorialization that reproduces itself.

When violence erupts into our everyday lives, as it has seemed to with increasing frequency this past year, we seek a forum to express our grief. Although we still set up physical memorials—for example, the 26^th mile of Boston Marathon was dedicated to the Newtown victims—the Internet is our most immediate public sphere. When today’s Marathon was interrupted by explosions, when the race stopped and the tragedy started, we took to the web to search for loved ones, to spread the news, to read the rumors, and to say something about how we felt: helpless, exhausted, indignant, sad, anxious, and confused. Why is it that we tweet our grief? Why do we say we “have Boston in our prayers?” Or rather, who do we think we are talking to? 

Facebook statuses and Twitter updates are like flowers rested against a grave. They wilt and brown in the sun and mold in the damp evening, rot and curl into the earth again. There the headstone stands, resilient against the days, but in its own time resigned to crumble, too. I visited a cemetery in rural Kansas last December and walked on markers collapsed into the prairie sod, unaware of who was underneath. But I think those physical signs of grief last far longer than digital memorials, at least of the social media variety. An update or a tweet lives forever in cyberspace, but disappears in a matter of minutes off the bottom edge of a newsfeed. A moment of social media grieving seems to confirm our ultimate helplessness in the face of horror. For what does it mean that I have said to no one in particular, my 602 followers or 819 friends, that I am saying a prayer for Boston? Why do I feel a compulsion to report my prayer to the void?

The cynic in me wants, very badly indeed, to indict those public prayers as social tokens, a coinage that degrades the death it intends to commemorate. Yet I cannot help but detect a faint hopefulness in those pleas. A catalogue of tweeted grief does not inspire hope that we can or will make it all meaningful. It accepts the emptiness of loss without a furious desire for filling cavities, for patching fissures and mending wounds. Instead, it wishes for a community of caring people who read and respond with their own unaddressed petitions, who can find meaning without reaction, reciprocation, and hate. 

In his op-ed for the New York Times, “The Slow Death of the American Author,” Scott Turow launches an indiscriminate polemic against e-books. Turow starts with a recent Supreme Court ruling—one permitting foreign holders of American copyrights to resell their editions in the United States—and ends with a Cold War flag wave against “Soviet-style repression.” Not surprisingly then, Turow’s position is consistently conservative. He advocates for the maintenance of book markets circa 1956, and his vision of an alternative to “Soviet Russia” is a variety of American democracy that is profoundly undemocratic. 

Turow’s favored argument is that literary careerism is protected in the Constitution, which includes a line about how Congress ought “to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Turow comments, “the idea that a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to democracy.” Turow’s first fallacy is to take the Constitution as a kind of divinely-inspired, a-historical document. In fact, copyright law was a relatively new and controversial doctrine in 1780s America, tied to questions about slavery: is owning a text like owning a person’s body?  In the early American republic, copyright law was implicated in the complex emergence of federalism—who had authority over fugitive slaves and pirated texts, state or federal governments? The idea that a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to a form of democracy genealogically related to slavery and empire.

The first “modern copyright law,” the Statute of Anne (1710), was amended by a later act in 1739 to prevent Irish booksellers from reprinting British titles and importing them to Britain. Sound familiar? At the time, Ireland was a British colony, and copyright law was an extension of imperial power motivated by racist and colonialist ideologies. Today, arguments for protectionist copyright laws recruit the same allies. 

Turow fetishizes a democracy that is by nature exclusive. By railing against Google’s project to digitize in-copyright books, academics who want to use copyrighted materials to teach! to teach in the classroom!, and libraries that want to lend e-books, Turow imagines a world where a print-to-digital transition keeps books in the hands of wealth. The most elite universities tighten their enclosures and the decline of public education accelerates. Libraries disappear. Or even without reduction to absurdity, Turow believes that a fundamental expansion of literary and print materials is inimical to democracy. That letting more people read is somehow hostile to political participation. And indeed, according to one account of the Constitution and its history, “democracy” as it is defined therein is exclusive. It excludes women. It excludes slaves.

One obvious rejoinder to my argument is that in the absence of certain copyright laws, literary production cannot exist. “There would be no books to make free if books were free.” Yet the most fertile periods of literary creation have surrounded controversies over copyright. For example, one need only look to Victorian England to see how literary piracy stimulated and informed our received canon. “There would be no Dickens without pirates.” And maybe we’re moving, in the digital moment, beyond the novel as a popular or artistic forum. Clinging to a myth about what literature is and how it works is counterproductive when media is in such rapid flux.

A cure for struggling authors won’t be found in protectionist and jingoist trade policies, but rather in the e-book industry itself. Turow acknowledges that the “six major publishing houses…all rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties…” That kind of collusion, along with structural changes in cultural markets, is contributing to the so-called “slow death of the American author” at least as significantly as foreign imports. Moreover, Turow recognizes that the real problem is piracy, not cheaper foreign products. Off-shore companies rolling out cheap e-books own copyrights to the works published. Perhaps foreign rights to American titles need to be sold at higher prices, and more of that revenue needs to devolve to American authors. But more urgently, the Department of Justice needs to crack down on e-book pirates who do not own the copyrights to the works they are distributing.

Turow winds his essay to a close with a rhetorical question: “Many people would say such changes are simply in the nature of markets, and see no problem if authors are left to write purely for the love of the game. But what sort of society would that be?” Well, it might be a “better” society than the one we currently inhabit. It might be a more tolerant society, a society with greater equality, with less fear and more compassion, a society less beholden to nationalism and more open to global communities, a society committed to compromising about development, climate change, immigration, and civil liberties. Of course, a class of professional authors would cease to exist. But then we would be without a class of people who, to preserve their livelihoods, are motivated to tell us certain stories about reality, to condition our responses to the world, to shape our experiences into limited scripts and to discipline our emotional and cultural lives. Whatever would we do.

Turow’s title alludes to a famous essay by Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author.” I’m not sure whether the allusion is ironic, because Barthes refutes Turow’s entire thesis. In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes attacks the idea that there is some author “out there” who owns “a work.” Barthes spent his career criticizing the politics of the novel, the very anti-democratic democracy Turow champions. But I have heard that Barthes loved nothing more than to read a Balzac novel before going to bed. The novel and all similarly nostalgic things are addictive. We know that they are bad for us, as citizens and as feeling, empathic people living in a world with others, yet we cannot resist their allure. If Barthes killed the author in 1967, we are now facing the slow death of the American novel, perhaps indicative of a coming freedom from the genre’s limitations.  

I have a confession: I hate April Fools’ Day.

It wasn’t always this way. When I was a pre-teen, I loved devising elaborate pranks. Saran wrap on the toilet was probably the peak of my creativity, if that gives you an idea. I also enjoyed reading silly news stories, the stuff just far side of normal. Since 1998, however, either I’ve become more gullible or the media has become more sophisticated. The thrill of satirical news comes from recognizing its satirical intent, but today, there’s often no real difference between The Onion and supposedly “serious” websites. April Fools’ pranks have converged with ordinary experience, too, making yesterday no holiday from reality as usual. I hate April Fools’ Day because it reveals how close we’ve come to living a parody of ourselves. 

In short, April Fools’ Day isn’t fun (or funny) when fake news and spoofs fail to deviate from normal. When we can believe that a joke is real, it may be a pointed commentary on our culture, or it may suggest that our culture has achieved a state of absurdity. Consider this post from Eater, “April Fools’ Pranks Across the Food and Restaurant World.” From “Food1852,” a super-retro take on the popular recipe site, to “Bacon Scope,” these pranks are totally believable. Whereas a decade ago a pork-flavored mouthwash prank would have been off-kilter enough to poke fun at the food industry, now it is boring and predictable. We live with chicken ‘n waffle flavored potato chips, and hey, maybe “bacon scope” could be a successful product. Successful satire depends on difference from its target. But what is there left to satire? Consumer culture and politics have become satires of themselves. In this age of irony, irony has lost its power of commentary, because everywhere it appears it is already expected.

I don’t mean to disparage the end of irony. A world without irony, where even the ironic is sincere, includes space for previously impossible experiences. In effect, there may be new revolutionary possibilities, utopic and dystopic potential, where irony withers away. Yet I will miss April Fools’ Day nonetheless. The ironic turn, a phenomenon of the early 21^st century, was a good thing while it lasted. But it was written with an apoptotic limit, an automatic self-destruct when it reached a certain critical mass. Now we would be wise to set its sour corpse aside. 

APRIL 1, 2013: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Sometimes a startup needs to examine where they are now and whether the product that they’ve developed could be applied to solve different market needs. Parse.ly is no different and over the past months we’ve given a lot of thought to applications of our semantic technology to solve new problems for publishers.

One problem we feel all publishers suffer from is finding the right metric to evaluate editorial quality. Pageviews, uniques, time spent — these are all so web 1.0! The only true answer in the question of editorial quality can come from the Big Data of Viral Content Signals from the Wisdom of Crowds.

That’s why this today we are launching a revolutionary new product to evaluate editorial quality: Parse.ly Deathmatch.

We make two publishers face off against each other on a topic we’ve extracted from their content and allow the interwebs to vote on which article is hot and which is not.

We’ve run our Hadoop clusters on overdrive to crunch our semantic and traffic datasets. Every vote is evaluated for 325 elements of content compatibility. Millions of data points are reticulated, re-masticated, and post-fabricated into a single important summary metric: are you HOT, or are you NOT?

We believe this is a new day in the media industry: finally, data-driven editorial decision making, at scale.

Enter Parse.ly Deathmatch Now!

Mike Sukmanowsky
Product Lead

UPDATE: our Chief Hadoop Officer has also written a technical explanation of our new Hotclick metric in Hotclicks: the Science Behind Parse.ly Deathmatch.

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