Y hablando de controlar al mundo, aquí comparto un artículo muy interesante de slate.com sobre la nueva estrategia de globalización de contenido de BuzFeed (portal lider en contenido viral), que involucra entre otras cosas una alianza con Duolingo (el sistema de enseñanza de lenguajes y traducción) para hacer que todo mundo consuma el mismo tipo de noticias, ayudando a viralizarlas en su propio idioma, y sin importar su trascendencia o su valor (o sea, sin importar que sea el Gangman Style, gatitos, hollywood y demás basura).
Debemos darnos cuenta que, en mucho sentidos, globalizar significa “hacer mas estúpido”…
By and large, BuzzFeed’s stories are written to be shared—the site used to prominently display the slogan “The Viral Web in Real-Time”—which explains why, according to one recent study, its stories receive more shares on Facebook than stories by any other site, including those of the New York Times and the Guardian. (A typical BuzzFeed story: 10 quotations, with pictures of Kanye West and Freddie Mercury, presented in a quiz-like format under the headline “Who Said It: Kanye West Or Freddie Mercury?”)
Judging by the spectacular results, BuzzFeed has turned “virality” into a science: Thanks to advanced analytics and tools of Big Data, they know exactly what needs to be said—and how—to get the story shared by most people. Its approach is best described as Taylorism of the viral: Just like Frederick Taylor knew how to design the factory floor to maximize efficiency, BuzzFeed knows how to design its articles to produce most clicks and shares. The content of the article is secondary to its viral performance..
Until now, there was just one barrier to BuzzFeed’s plan for world domination: While many of its stories are highly visual, they still contain a fair amount of text—a barrier to non-English speakers. Well, this barrier is no more: BuzzFeed has struck a deal with Duolingo. Duolingo is a promising startup for studying languages that was founded by Luis von Ahn, the person we have to thank (or blame) for inventing the anti-spam CAPTCHA system that prompts us to type what we see in two pictures to make sure we are not robots on a spamming mission. Initially, the CAPTCHA system relied on random text, but then Von Ahn realized that he could get people to fight spam and help to digitize books at the same time: Why have people enter random text if they can be entering hard-to-read text from scanned books?
Internet guru Clay Shirky sees such logic—which he has dubbed “cognitive surplus”—at work in many other parts of digital culture. In his 2010 book of the same name, Shirky argued that we must find ways to harness this “cognitive surplus” and turn it into social good. Duolingo is Von Ahn’s attempt to build a business by leveraging “the cognitive surplus” that is inherent in language learning. Millions—perhaps billions—of sentences are translated every day by students of foreign languages. All those sentences tend to disappear into the void of language textbooks and student notebooks. This is where BuzzFeed comes in: Students who sign up for Duolingo’s language courses would be tasked with translating BuzzFeed articles, one sentence at a time. The translated stories will then appear online. The model is quite elegant: Students have to translate sentences anyway; Duolingo doesn’t charge students for language learning, but BuzzFeed does pay it for the final translations.
Here is BuzzFeed’s version of “global village”: If its plan works, more and more people around the globe will be reading about U.S. popular culture in their native languages. No, what it is interested in is taking viral stories that have already proven their worth in English and taking them global, conquering even more eyeballs that were previously hard to reach due to language barriers...
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