I’ve been musing lately on user generated content and I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem with most of it is that it’s content generated by users. I’ll finish the post by sort of disagreeing with myself on how important it is but for the time being let’s define terms to help explain why I’d make such a facetious statement.
First of all ‘user’. It’s a term totally lacking in distinction, there’s no qualification or specificity about it. A user doesn’t necessarily have any experience, academic or otherwise, that qualifies a statement or judgement they might make. What they say could be nothing more than a piece of self-indulgent expression or just plain malice.
Secondly ‘generated’ and ‘content’. Hmmmm, it gives me a sense of something spewed out by the megawatt or the furlong. Like the apocryphal story of the Waterstones customer asking for three yards of green leather books for a study he was having fitted. It’s not user crafted or user forged content for a good reason. One of the key problems is the sheer ease involved in making it.
The best example of this is in music. It’s now officially harder to get signed as a band on My Space than it ever was before My Space existed. Any half-baked shoe gazer can record and upload their oeuvre along with a couple of photos of their biro ‘luv’ and ‘hat’ knuckle tattoos. At least in the old days the effort required to make a demo tape filtered out some of the chaff.
This might sound like the sort of rant more at home in the Daily Mail or the letters page of the Telegraph but stick with me. To my mind this has actually been a critically important process. The explosion in UGC across the spectrum has actually stimulated a new and more intelligent breed of organisations that can help us filter. According to a recent article in the New Scientist, humans can only really cope with a choice of six options and riding in over the hill have come the white knights of content curation to save us. I include in this posse the sophisticated algorithms that sit at the heart of every price comparison site (how long before somebody does a comparison site comparison site?) and coolhunter/trendwatcher sites that bring together the best in retail or fashion.
So far so simple. (I’m not pretending this is bleeding edge thinking) It’s very much a case of the pendulum swinging away and then coming back again. We’ve rejected what we knew in favour of more choice, we’ve been given that choice and now we want somebody to take it away again and give us the six choices that allow us to feel empowered but not overwhelmed.
You might think that we’re destined to suffer the vagaries of this pendulum interminably but there’s a happy medium. If you’ll forgive the media wankery, I think we can safely call this web 2.5. (why 2.5 and not 3.0? – there’ll probably be another instalment on that shortly) Organisations, and I suppose more specifically sites, can and should do both.
This is where the immediate future for UGC lies. Sites that offer the choice of classic UGC with its double headed hydra of flimsiness and credibility, which people are beginning to view with the appropriate degree of caution and cynicism, coupled with more authoritative, trustworthy content managed by people with the right credentials.
The really clever bit is linking the two. The best sites will give the users the subject, motivation and forum to generate a meat market of their own content and will then feed their authoritative content beast with choice cuts from the result.
First of all ‘user’. It’s a term totally lacking in distinction, there’s no qualification or specificity about it. A user doesn’t necessarily have any experience, academic or otherwise, that qualifies a statement or judgement they might make. What they say could be nothing more than a piece of self-indulgent expression or just plain malice.
Secondly ‘generated’ and ‘content’. Hmmmm, it gives me a sense of something spewed out by the megawatt or the furlong. Like the apocryphal story of the Waterstones customer asking for three yards of green leather books for a study he was having fitted. It’s not user crafted or user forged content for a good reason. One of the key problems is the sheer ease involved in making it.
The best example of this is in music. It’s now officially harder to get signed as a band on My Space than it ever was before My Space existed. Any half-baked shoe gazer can record and upload their oeuvre along with a couple of photos of their biro ‘luv’ and ‘hat’ knuckle tattoos. At least in the old days the effort required to make a demo tape filtered out some of the chaff.
This might sound like the sort of rant more at home in the Daily Mail or the letters page of the Telegraph but stick with me. To my mind this has actually been a critically important process. The explosion in UGC across the spectrum has actually stimulated a new and more intelligent breed of organisations that can help us filter. According to a recent article in the New Scientist, humans can only really cope with a choice of six options and riding in over the hill have come the white knights of content curation to save us. I include in this posse the sophisticated algorithms that sit at the heart of every price comparison site (how long before somebody does a comparison site comparison site?) and coolhunter/trendwatcher sites that bring together the best in retail or fashion.
So far so simple. (I’m not pretending this is bleeding edge thinking) It’s very much a case of the pendulum swinging away and then coming back again. We’ve rejected what we knew in favour of more choice, we’ve been given that choice and now we want somebody to take it away again and give us the six choices that allow us to feel empowered but not overwhelmed.
You might think that we’re destined to suffer the vagaries of this pendulum interminably but there’s a happy medium. If you’ll forgive the media wankery, I think we can safely call this web 2.5. (why 2.5 and not 3.0? – there’ll probably be another instalment on that shortly) Organisations, and I suppose more specifically sites, can and should do both.
This is where the immediate future for UGC lies. Sites that offer the choice of classic UGC with its double headed hydra of flimsiness and credibility, which people are beginning to view with the appropriate degree of caution and cynicism, coupled with more authoritative, trustworthy content managed by people with the right credentials.
The really clever bit is linking the two. The best sites will give the users the subject, motivation and forum to generate a meat market of their own content and will then feed their authoritative content beast with choice cuts from the result.
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