One of my clients had an interesting problem crop up. Their one and only customer decided to cease doing business with LLC vendors and is requiring my client to convert to a corporation. During the course of working with the client to find a solution I came across this article from eHow. I couldn't believe what I was reading. Whoever wrote this article didn't have a clue what they were talking about. The point of this post is not to point out the article's errors. All I want to do is highlight the fact that in the midst of this new era of user generated content there is a cancer and it's called Demand Media (DM).
DM purports to use the idle cycles of journalists to produce content that is in demand on the internet. Using algorithms companies like DM identify what users are searching for as well as what advertisers are willing to pay for. They then offer a journalist with a free afternoon a few bucks to write that article. DM has little interest in whether the content is good or not (as evidenced by the above article). All DM needs is for that article to show up in search results so that there is enough traffic for advertisers to find attractive.
This is the opposite of the "content is king" model that saw the rise of blogging and niche experts. These folks created content because they cared about it. Advertisers found them eventually (sometimes) but it was the content that came first. Now it seems we are entering an era where knowledge is created in $15 chunks that aren't worth the ink toner they'd take to print. In my opinion DM is the snake oil salesman of the internet. You might get better if you buy what they're selling, but only if your problem wasn't that big of a deal in the first place.
My advice when searching for knowledge on the internet is to steer clear of any resource where the only attribution given to the expert you'll be following is that he or she was a "contributing writer."