Content farms appeared on the scene several years ago, as publishers tried to figure out how to drive search traffic to their websites, since Google had become one of the top traffic sources in the industry. As SEO or search-engine optimization became a crucial part of the business, some took this principle to its logical conclusion and started creating content specifically to attract Google and profit from advertising keywords (Note: We’re going to be talking about alternative methods of monetization for content at our paidContent Live conference in April).

Content farms had an explicitly financial motive

One of the most prominent players was Demand Media, which owned eHow, an early attempt at SEO for content. The model was simple: pay a large stable of freelance writers very small amounts of money (often as little as $2 per article) to create or aggregate “service oriented” content around specific ad-heavy topics. This version of the business was more or less killed by Google via updates to its search algorithm, which pushed low-quality content further down in search results.

Walk argues that Medium and Quora’s new blogging platform (which converted what were message boards into individual blogs) as well as the blog network Svbtle and LinkedIn’s Influencer program share many of the same features as early content farms. Among other things, he says they offer:

• Article-based construction: In other words, a blog-style layout and format with multiple, dated posts written by an individual author
• Cross-promotion: Visitors come to one blog post and are shown others by the same author or different authors to try and entice them to stay
• Easy to use publishing tools: Medium and some other players offer lightweight content-creation features that make it easy to write and publish

For me at least, the main difference between what Medium and Svbtle and Quora seem to be doing and what “content farms” did is the lack of an obvious financial motive. True content farms were designed to maximize the search traffic so that they could generate advertising revenue (at one point, 30 percent of Demand Media’s revenue came from Google ads). But Svbtle and Medium, for example, don’t have advertising of any kind — although of course it’s possible that they could decide to turn on ads at some later date, once their traffic numbers justify it.

The rise of content farms for good?

Even Walk says that he sees these new platforms as “content farms for good,” meaning they are mostly focused on curation of quality content, which is why I think it’s better to think of them as curation engines rather than farms — or perhaps as “artisanal” content producers, to use a popular term. Both Svbtle and Medium are clearly putting a lot of emphasis on selecting quality contributors, since both are invitation-only, and LinkedIn seems to take this approach as well (Quora is much more open, in part because it converted its existing message boards).

LinkedIn clearly has an interest in driving traffic to its site with its Influencer content, in the hope that readers of those articles might decide to stick around or visit more often, and make use of the other things that actually produce revenue for the company. But in that sense, its program is more like what some call “content marketing,” which uses content that isn’t directly monetized as a way of promoting a brand or an advertiser’s main business.

In the end, all these platforms seem to be designed to appeal to writers who may have thoughts to contribute, but don’t necessarily want to maintain their own blog. Making that easy, and curating the results so that they are of high quality, may ultimately be a way around Google’s content-farm algorithms, but in the end it doesn’t really matter if higher-quality content is what gets produced. In that sense at least, Google’s efforts seem to be working.

Images courtesy of Flickr user D. Miller and Shutterstock / Gl0ck

“We’re not going to be a place for cat photos,” said Marc Bodnick, a product and business executive at Quora who explained the product in an interview Wednesday. “We’re not a site for light, viral, multimedia-sharing without text. We’re a site where people share ideas and thoughts. So the same type of people who write answers are going to be the same types of people who write on blogs.”

The move toward blogging represents a shift for Quora, which has so far been entirely about questions and answers that users could upvote and follow. But the site, which was launched by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo in 2010, has always been about providing high-quality information to a dedicated group of readers, and in this sense the addition of blogging makes sense. Not to mention that blogging could attract a larger audience to Quora than questions and answers that require a login, setting itself up for greater advertising opportunities than it would have otherwise.

D’Angelo sat down with GigaOM earlier this month where he explained where the company is headed:

“We think at a very high level there is a lot of knowledge that is inside people’s head and is not accessible. Sure, the internet (of today) is pretty vast and big, but it is still not where we can access that knowledge that easily. So you have a blog, but a lot of people don’t have an audience or aren’t as connected and able to find the information as you. Access to that knowledge is much harder, and our goal is to make it easy. Anything you want to know, you go to Quora and get it.”

Quora executives are pushing the idea that through the new blogging platform, anyone with a good idea and smart writing can become famous on the site, even if that person doesn’t have a strong Twitter following or an existing popular blog of their own.

“You can write an answer that goes viral on the site despite no one following you,” Bodnick said.

And to a certain extent, this is true — there are indviduals, like the guy who wrote about his car breaking down in front of Steve Job’s house, who have become “Quora famous,” to an extent. Bodnick noted that some of the service’s “top writers“ get 30,000 views on a post per month, and some of the very top writers get up to 100,000.

But Quora attracts a very specific readership in a few key areas, like movies, technology, or startups, and the people who have built a dedicated Quora following seem more poised for Quora blogging success than entirely new users who write about topics that are less popular. If you’re blogging about Steve Jobs and post your writing under the Steve Jobs topic, which has thousands of existing followers, you could do well. But it seems fairly topic-specific, and hardly a guarantee of publishing fame.

There are also so many blogging platforms out there, from WordPress to Tumblr to Medium to Branch to LinkedIn, it’s hard to think how Quora’s new tools presents much for the average blogger — they seem likely to excite people who are already consistent Quora posters. But for those users, the platform could allow them to expand on ideas that aren’t posed as answers to questions, and a new rich text editor for mobile released in a few weeks will add to that experience as well.

Qian Jin of Nanjing, China, has applied to register marks like Foursquare, Twitter, Quora and Instagram and has also bought dozens of websites like Pinterests.com and Pinterest.de

Qian’s activities are described in a lawsuit filed by Pinterest last week in San Francisco. In its complaint, the popular image site says the defendant is a “serial cyber-squatter who has registered and owns hundreds of infringing domain names.” The company points to Qian’s “Pinterests.com“, a site that uses red-lettering similar to Pinterest but that appears to be just a dumping ground for advertisements.

While this type of cyber-squatting has been around for years, the Chinese efforts stand out because they appear to systematically target up-and-coming internet firms, and because of the trademark applications.

While firms like Pinterest can challenge the trademark filings in the US if they are not in good faith, the situation in China is murkier. Increasingly, Chinese firms are obtaining questionable trademarks and successfully asserting them against companies like Apple. Peter Toren, a former prosecutor and Washington intellectual property lawyer, has previously described some of the cases against Apple as “a stick-up.“

Pinterest is asking the San Francisco court for damages and for an order barring Qian Jin or his associates from using its name. The company also wants the court to instruct the US Patent and Trademark Office to refuse the applications for “Pinterest” and “Pinterests.”

Here are some of the other names Pinterest is trying to reclaim, followed by a copy of its court complaint:

Pinterest Complaint

So credit Swedish startup Mancx for trying something different.

The Stockholm-based company — which is today announcing a $1.65 million round of financing from Swedish backers Almi Invest and Chalmers Innovation Seed Fund — has spent the past year developing a twist on the traditional Q&A formula: it’s a service where people can get paid for giving answers.

The idea is that there are some questions that people would happily pay money to get the right answer to, rather than wade through huge swathes of opinion or commentary, like many free Q&A rivals.

“We’re targeting the premium segment of information that people won’t give away for free,” says co-founder Henrik Dillman. He suggests that the potential is substantial. “Stack Exchange is one of the best Q&A sites out there, but even it has over 600,000 unanswered questions. If five or 10 percent of those people were willing to pay for the answer, that’s big.”

The site works much like any auction site or marketplace: people post questions and suggest the price they’d be willing to pay to get a good answer. Those who think they can provide a solution place their own bids in the auction, and the asker gets to pick the winner (people can also offer answers for free if they want). There’s a money-back guarantee in case the answer is no good, and a reputational system in place to try and prevent people from gaming the service.

“It’s a big challenge,” admits the site’s other co-founder, Mattias Guilotte, of the need to make the reputation system work. “Once you have information, you have it — you can’t take it out of somebody’s brain.”

I’ll admit I am skeptical of the concept working long-term, purely because the internet drives down the value of information — something we have seen time and time again. But the duo insist that they are making headway, and they’ve got some pretty strong data behind them. Riding on the back of LinkedIn, the site has access to more than 600,000 users, and currently has 10,000 ongoing questions on site.

But here’s the real killer: people are paying serious money already. Right now the average transaction, they say, is worth around $150, and it’s going up over time.

That’s partly because there’s a community — mainly centered around marketing and sales — that places a high value on the answers they get. And the team plans to extend that opportunity by pushing hard in new communities and new countries, using the new funding to first open an office in San Francisco, and then targeting India and China. Put it all together, they say, and the opportunity here could be significant.

“Around 300 million people turn to Q&A online each month, but low quality answers are a big problem,” says Dillman. “It’s a big shift from three or four years ago, when people expected everything should be free.”

The “crowdsourced” question-and-answer site Quora raised more than a few eyebrows on Monday when it closed a new $50-million round of financing that values the fledgling company at $400 million, despite a conspicuous lack of scale when it comes to users. Is this just another example of the bubble-style funding rounds that have made Instagram and Pinterest the talk of the VC business, or a sign of how much power the “Facebook mafia” has in Silicon Valley? Or is Quora really onto something that could potentially turn into a multibillion-dollar idea?

Quora has more or less admitted that it doesn’t really need the $50 million it just finished raising, at least not yet. Co-founder Adam D’Angelo said (on Quora, of course) that more than half of the Series A funding round of $11 million the startup raised in 2010 is still sitting in the bank, unused. So why raise that much money at all? As Om has noted, one reason Quora did so is simply that it could — there was apparently plenty of interest, and the company wound up with financing from original Facebook investor Peter Thiel, among others.

Raising money is easy for Quora, so why not do it?

This is the startup version of the old adage “make hay while the sun shines,” and when two of your co-founders are Facebook alumni — Adam D’Angelo was the chief technology officer of the social network, and Charlie Cheever oversaw the development of Facebook’s “open graph” platform — there is plenty of hay to be made, especially since both founders are likely to become extremely wealthy when Facebook goes public (more than a third of the $50 million that Quora raised reportedly came from D’Angelo himself). More than anything, VCs love to give money to people who don’t need it.

D’Angelo has said that one of the reasons Quora raised the funding is so that it would have more “runway,” or room to prove itself and its concept before it has to start making money. And it’s clear, based on interviews with the founders, that the company sees what it is building as a potentially world-changing idea. Both seem devoted to it not because they believe it will be easy to flip or sell for billions of dollars (which they don’t really need), but because they think there is an interesting problem worth solving. As Cheever told me in 2010:

We’re not really focused on making money right now. I think if we can solve the problem we are trying to solve, we will find a way to make money.

In a nutshell, that problem is how to aggregate or crowdsource expertise on a wide variety of topics efficiently, and it’s one that any number of startups and services have tried to tackle, all the way from Yahoo Answers and Ask.com to Formspring, Reddit and Stack Exchange. And most have failed: Yahoo Answers and others have degenerated into cesspools of uselessness and spam, while companies like Aardvark disappeared inside Google and other acquirers, never to be seen again. Facebook launched its own Questions service in 2010, but there’s no sign that many people are using it much.

Among those who have tried to attack the problem from a different angle are sites like Demand Media’s eHow, which pays writers to come up with articles that contain some kind of expertise about a topic. Interestingly enough, eHow was built by Josh Hannah — who bought it in 2004 and built it into a major player before selling it to Demand Media, and is also an investor in an open-source spinoff called WikiHow. Hannah, now a partner with the venture-capital fund Matrix Partners, is an investor in Quora’s latest financing round.

Wikipedia is the model, but can Quora mimic its success?

Despite all the failures, there is one obvious example of a successful crowdsourced knowledge base, used by hundreds of millions of web surfers daily: Wikipedia. More than a decade after it was originally launched, the site is one of the top 10 most-visited web destinations on the Internet with 15 billion pageviews per month. And even more unlikely, Wikipedia has accomplished this feat without raising any venture-capital funding whatsoever, relying solely on donations and charitable funding.

The two sites have somewhat different approaches: Wikipedia asks users to contribute links and verified facts to articles that are designed to be a one-stop source of information about a topic — contributors are explicitly not allowed to state opinions based on their personal knowledge. Quora, however, tries to get those with knowledge to answer questions about specific topics, and then the community gets to vote on which answer they like best. Both sites have strict rules about what kinds of content can be posted, to avoid the Yahoo Answers problem. As a user of the site, I’ve found the quality of the answers to be consistently pretty high.

One of the main things that has helped Wikipedia grow as quickly as it has is the fact that it ranks extremely highly in Google search results, since it is seen by the search giant as an unbiased source of factual information. Given that kind of traffic, Wikipedia could easily generate hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenues if it added some innocuous banner advertisements to its pages (something it refuses to consider). And some Quora supporters believe that results from the site could benefit from the same phenomenon, especially as Google looks for more social signals about information.

So the ingredients of a compelling story are there: founders who have their eye on a big vision, who aren’t motivated solely by a quick flip for cash, and who are trying to build a Wikipedia-style global knowledge database powered by individual input from experts. The fact that Quora’s usage numbers seem a little lackluster is the only fly in the ointment for believers — but then, there was a time when Wikipedia wasn’t really a household name either.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

Quora is the latest in a string of Q&A startups to get funding in recent months. Formspring.me, Fluther, Hunch and PeerPong have all raised rounds to expand in what is already a crowded market. Why the need for another player? “The way we think about this is there