Fracking for the Dummy Committee

To the "other end" of the rock?

It's been said that the moose is a deer designed by a committee; a reference to the animal's somewhat bizarre appearance... although no one ever chased by a 1200-pound animal that can run 35 MPH is concerned about its appearance! But we digress. The point being, we suspect, that something created by most committees is going to look substandard at best. That just might be the problem with content written by Paul Mike John of EzineArticles.com: a committee approach combines the knowledge of the three guys¹ but instead exacerbates the combined ignorance. Just look at "Fracking for Oil: How Does It Work?" and you'll see what we mean.

Fracking Sand, the Dummy Version

Frac sand (top), low-quality
sand (bottom)

From time to time we like to dip our research toes in the murky waters of sites heavily populated by content spinners and ESL freelancers. Bubblews and PersonaPaper are both dead now, but (for some unknown reason) EzineArticles.com and Wizzley.com live on. It's at EzineArticles.com that we found the interestingly-named Paul Mike John and his (their?) somewhat bizarre take on the sand mined for use in hydraulic fracturing, which he called "Mini Diamonds: What Is Frac Sand?"

Gas Wells for Dummies (HSW Week 7)

Natural gas wellhead

It stands to reason that some content-farm freelancers are competent, at least in the areas where they have expertise. We have no one on staff who's qualified to argue with an M.D. about drug interactions or with an experienced welder about the difference between TIG and MIG welding. HSW's Jamie Page Deaton seems to be one such competent freelancer when it comes to automotive questions. Her problem today, though, is that she apparently knows little or nothing about "How does natural gas drilling work?" but wrote the article anyway.

Maybe because "gas" was in the title? Who knows...

The Marcellus Shale for Dummies

Fracking the Marcellus Shale

The staff geologist is, sadly, quite used to the lay person's misuse of the term "geologic formation" to mean a geographic feature such as a mountain or valley. He realizes he's just being pedantic, but he's a grumpy old guy so that's his normal status. All that, however, is probably why a post at WiseGEEK.com titled "What Is the Marcellus Shale?" has his metaphorical panties tightly bunched. It's probably a good thing that freelancer R. Stamm is hiding behind that first initial, because our guy owns a couple of rock hammers...

Fracking for the Scientifically Clueless

Schematic of fracking job

The more often a term shows up in search results, the more often freelancers will seize on it in hopes of collecting a few hit. Who knows, their junk might even go viral (though quite probably not). A case in point, the term "fracking" generates more than thirteen million hits at google. Wanna bet that a substantial number of them link to content generated by freelancers? By that, we mean people like Sam Jones, who jumped on the SERP bandwagon with a piece at InfoBarrel.com he cleverly titled "Fracking: Putting the F-Word in the Energy Business."

Jones was all over InfoBarrel in the days before the Panda update killed so many content farms, pumping out trash on just about any topic that showed up near the top of google keyword results. Like many of his ilk, Sam mainly reworded other content (though to his credit, he at least didn't just run it through a spinning algorithm). Problem being, of course, that when you write about everything under the sun without sufficient background knowledge, you get stuff wrong – and Jones gets stuff wrong... like

Oil and Gas, the Dummies Version

Drilling rig on site

Today’s example of a woefully unqualified boob expounding on something about which he (or perhaps it’s a she?) knows squat comes from another paragon of quality, HubPages.com. The Dumbass of the Day goes by the pen name jmccas1, posting his/her thoughts on the topic of “Unconventional Resources.”¹ With luck, J didn't make any money off this one, though in all probability s/he made more than we'll make by correcting him. Ah, well, such is life.