Google Panda update

You may have heard something of the fuss surrounding the latest Google ranking update, you may have even seen it's effects (especially if you write on one of those sites that pay you to write 'articles').
Google have seen fit to say quite a lot about the criteria they have used for changing the rankings of some sites, although as usual they will not be specific. To save you from having to sift through all the quotes an comments - it all boils down to one thing:

It's all about CONTENT.

Google is 'de-ranking' what it considers low quality or 'shallow' content, content that adds nothing new, or even repeats content found elsewhere - it's just not going to tell you how it evaluates a site.
In short, if you are writing useful, insightful original content you have nothing to be worried about. Nevertheless, this updates threatens the 'paid to' world as it is targeting sites that have thousands of individual writers adding their own content on a daily basis.