Barnes & Noble tries to filter Web 2.0 from how-to content

IDG News Service — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:42:26 -0400

Barnes & Noble Inc. has started providing authoritative how-to guides and videos created by experts on topics ranging from estate planning to fertilizing a garden in an effort to help users who are facing an explosion of user-generated content feeding them inaccurate information.

The bookseller Wednesday announced a new partnership with VideoJug Corp. to add videos to its fledgling Quamut.com how-to site. Quamut (a loose translation of the Latin for how-to) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble.

While the Web is overflowing with information on a wide variety of topics, users are increasingly finding it hard to determine the reliability of the data, said Dan Weiss, publisher and managing director of Quamut. But Quamut -- which also produces a wiki for user-generated content -- has opted to focus on guides written by experts that have been edited, fact-checked and copy-edited, he added.

"Our competitors, as interesting as they are, don't have the authority and the reliability that Quamut brings to the content," Weiss said. "There are millions of folks looking for how-to content on the Web. What is mostly on the Web is user-generated and hardly authoritative. There has been some kind of backlash to content on the Web because, 'Is there wisdom in crowds?' Sometimes, but not always."

Weiss noted that Quamut does include a wiki where users can contribute their own content. But that is kept distinctly separate from the how-to guides. "Users have a lot to contribute," he noted. "We believe there are a lot of experts out there, but we also want to distinguish between what we say is right and what someone else says is right."

The deal with VideoJug to add videos to the site is aimed at topics where users can clearly benefit from visual demonstrations, Weiss added. "When it comes to CPR, for example, it is much easier and more helpful to show a video than to merely show a picture," he said.

Users can read more than 1,000 online guides (called Quamuts) for free or pay to download a PDF on a topic, Weiss added. In addition, Barnes & Noble is selling laminated versions of the Quamuts in its stores and on its main Web site. The bookseller also plans to cross-market its books and how-to guides on the two sites.

Quamut has also launched widgets that can be accessed from the Yahoo Inc. and iGoogle home pages or Apple Inc.'s Macintosh dashboard.

Quamut.com is organized into five categories: House & Home, Hobbies & Leisure, Money & Business, Computers & Technology, and Mind & Body. Topics covered include learning chess, managing a 401(k) plan and buying a digital camera.

Kristen Nicole, a blogger at Mashable, noted that while some critics have written off Quamut as a collection of nonrelated how-to guides, the site is actually an experiment in "tackling the long tail of the publishing industry, with a distinct leveraging of online distribution methods."

Adding video to the printed how-to offerings is the logical next step, she added.

"The visual enhancement that video provides is in alignment with what Barnes & Noble has already initiated with the Quamut site, and having VideoJug do some of the heavy lifting on the distribution end (which includes Yahoo and Apple widgets) means that Barnes & Noble has more room to play around with its online strategy as it moves away from a strict printed media industry. VideoJug gets to grow its library as well as further establish itself as a leader in the online how-to video sector," she said.

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Barnes & Noble tries to filter Web 2.0 from how-to content