Monday, January 1, 2007

User-Generated Content (UGC)

User-Generated Content or UGC refers to the online content like digital video, blogging, podcasting and mobile phone photography produced by netizens (online community) like me rather than publishers and TV producers. UGC has seen a phenomenal growth in the last two years and I see this growth continuing in the coming years. UGC is also part of the phenomena called social networking, as most of the time this user generated content is meant for a particular social group and thus advancing their networking.
Wikipedia which is the free encyclopedia started by Jimmy Wales in March 2000, was the first attempt to tap the huge potential of the user generated content. Today I believe it is the most widely used encyclopedia site and all its content is generated/edited by netizens. Jimmy the noble man he is, did not try to profit from this and Wikipedia remains a non-profit effort. But others who followed him like Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Second Life are making big bucks on the content netizens are generating at their websites. Some would say that it is a new form of online scam in which netizens make all the content, and they (promoters of these websites) keep all the money. You Tube led this money making parade with the $1.65 billion acquisition by Google. But irrespective of who is making the money it is giving people a new way to interact, share their talent and social networking.

You can gauge the importance of these UGC and social networking sites by the fact that Cingular has launched MySpace Mobile for those of you yearning to edit your MySpace content; the additional cost for this service is $3.

Since any user can create UGC, via multiple points of entry, it's more difficult to control the quality and relevance of the content being input. Credibility of the person and the content being posted is also a concern.But I have found users are doing their due diligence and UGC community is more involved and is making sure that the content is relevant and reliable. I would say the quality of the content thus generated is better than our own Bollywood productions which only produces about 5% quality movies out of the thousand odd movies produced annually.
User-generated content is a great way to tap into the knowledge of corporate users who aren't official intranet content providers.

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