Making Hay for Dummies

harvesting hay

A few of the staffers are country kids, having grown up in small towns and even on farms or ranches. Some of them have even worked at such jobs as detasseling corn and baling hay, neither of which is likely to appear on the resume of most j-school grads turned freelancer. An even more unlikely ag expert, however, is a "social science" student from Lahore, one like Nida Rasheed. Her unfamiliarity with farming is pretty obvious, at least based on the post "Types of Hay Cutting Machinery," which Leaf Group niched at CareerTrend.com.

Sandstone Quarries for Dummies

Quarrying processes

It's always a bit amusing, although also a bit infuriating, to see what sort of bushwa clueless freelancers visit on the internet when trying to answer questions on totally unfamiliar topics. You know, fashion bloggers trying to explain plumbing, plumbers trying to pass along fashion tips... that's why we're here: to ridicule people who do that solely for money; people like CareerTrend.com contributor Rebekah Smith and posts like "How Is Sandstone Mined?"

Sphalerite for Dummy Miners

Sphalerite specimen

If you look up at the top of this page, you'll probably figure out that the reason this blog is published is to expose freelancing fakes, people to whom income is more important than accuracy. Many of them scattered their work to multiple sites on the web in the era of the content farm, and today's DotD nominee is an example of such broadcasting. We already caught Andrew Kirmayer pretending knowledge of rocks for WiseGEEK, this time he's spreading it thick at the eHow niche CareerTrend.com: let's look at what Andy had to say in "How Is Sphalerite Mined?"

Bush Hogs for Dummies

Perhaps the greatest weakness of Demand Media's eHow.com model was that the founders fervently believed that any writer could address any topic with a little research. Well, they probably realize that was utter bull, but didn't care because their way could make them boatloads of bucks. Whatever the reason, however, the website was infamous for the failure of its writers to connect to reality. That's what happened when Glenda Taylor (also known as Glyn Sheridan) tried to explain "How Does a Tractor Work With a Bush Hog?"; now available at CareerTrend.com.¹

Dummy Answers to Ambiguous Questions

An electrician at work

One of the reasons our staffers spend so much time in the Leaf Group niche sites¹ is that the sites' "contributors" are so often incapable of answering open-ended questions. That fault may well have lain with eHow.com – the niches are filled with old eHow content moved by the successor to Demand Media – because of the site's strict limitations on content size. Then again, the fault may be the freelancer's lack of vision, such as that displayed by Denise Brandenberg. She apparently didn't think through the definition of "best" when writing, "The Best States to Work as an Electrician" at BizFluent.com (now at CareerTrend, which makes a lot more sense).

Completions for Dummies

Downhole completions

Careers, we guess, are pretty much like any other topic: if you want to learn what a [name of occupation] does, your best bet is to ask someone who has the job. Your second best bet is to ask someone who's seen the job done. Around the Antisocial Network, we suspect that your worst bet is to ask someone at a Demand Media (now Leaf Group) site: if you do that, you're likely to end up with rubbish like eHow.com's Shanea Patterson threw together for "The Job Description of a Completions Engineer," now appearing at Leaf Group's niche site CareerTrend.com.

Measuring Elevation for Dummies

surveyors without a GPS

When it comes to lousy answers to simple questions, we here at the Antisocial Network always turn to our friends at the mother lode of misinformation, eHow.com. You can almost always find an answer that's wrong for one reason or another by visiting a Demand Media niche site, and today's no exception. Returning DotD Nicole Schmoll is here to both under- and over-explain an interesting topic, "How Is Land Elevation Measured?" for CareerTrend.com.

Clinometers for Dummies

Clinometer

It's said that the truly wise person is not the one who knows everything, it's the one who knows how to find out everything. Well, that was true in the age when researching a question involved a trip to the library or, at the very least, to one's shelf of reference books. In the age of the internet, however, anyone can find out anything – or so we've been told. The problem, of course, is that the information that comes may end up being, shall we say, substandard. By "substandard," we mean "wrong"; on a bad day, we mean "utter bull." We weren't initially sure whether today's a bad day or not – we'll let you decide whether Catalina Bixler was wrong or spreading the bull in her eHow.com post, "Uses of a Clinometer" (now appearing at the Leaf Group niche site CareerTrend.com).

Overburden Pressure for Scientifically Confused Dummies

Density tool sonde (Schlumberger)

If you are looking for a simple, reasonable explanation of an unfamiliar concept that is somewhat esoteric, you don't go to eHow.com in your search. If you need a solution to a highly technical problem, you aren't going to find it anywhere at Leaf Group, including their flagship of all misinformation, eHow. That doesn't mean someone on their crack(ed) staff of freelancers hasn't tried to answer your question at one time or another; in fact, it's a safe bet that someone with absolutely no background in the subject has done precisely that. Someone like Darby Stevenson, who parlayed a double BA in religion and international studies into an article that allegedly explains "How to Calculate Overburden Pressure" at CareerTrend.com (another  Leaf Group niche site). To say his reply is half-assed is an insult to half-assed answers everywhere...

Darby more or less gets the definition right in his introduction:

Surveying for Dummies

surveyor's transit

When someone who knows nothing about a subject has the gall to hold forth on that topic anyway, it's funny -- assuming you're watching a sitcom or film comedy. In real life, though, it's not funny: taking in the resulting misinformation wastes your time and could even be dangerous. That never stopped some eHow.com writers, the kind who simply reword the information from more authoritative sources and, in the process, royally screw it up. We're talking about freelance journalism majors like Elyse James, who we caught holding forth on a hitherto unfamiliar (to her) topic in "How to Use Surveying Equipment" (now niched by Leaf Group at CareerTrend.com)

Elyse had a problem, though: she didn't know jack about surveying before taking on this "assignment"; but that clearly didn't stop her. Her instructions consist of four parts:

Backyard Oil Wells for Dummies (Oil Biz Week)

Oil pumpjack

Everyone wants to strike it rich, preferably without working much (if at all). Why else do you think almost every state in the USA has a lottery? And why do you think those who have studied statistics call the lottery an "idiot tax"? Well, whenever the price of oil tops $100 per barrel, those same idiots come out of the woodwork; and idiot freelancers are there to feed their hunger. Today's example is Louie Doverspike of eHow, (mis)informing his readers about "How to Drill for Oil in Your Backyard"¹ at CareerTrend.com.

Like most people who think gasoline comes out of tanks at their local GetGo, Louie knows nothing about the processes of hydrocarbon exploration, much less how one might actually do what some (other) idiot on the 'net is thinking about. Nevertheless, he launches into his six-step process:

This Dummy Needs a Punch

Metal tap for threading holes

Freelance writers habitually pretend experience and knowledge they lack in reality, presumably to lend credence to the wonderful advice they are sharing. By "sharing," I actually mean "rewording from another source." If they get it right, fake experience is usually harmless (except perhaps to their karma). If they get it wrong, it just looks ludicrous. Take eHow.com's Larry Parr, who displayed his ignorance (again) even as he claimed experience in an article called "How to Use a Screw Extractor" at CareerTrend.com. At CareerTrend? really? Larry told us that to use a screw extractor, you need a "metal tap," and here's how you'd use it: