generated content

iCarly Awards
$1.99

Participative Web And User-Created Content: Web 2.0 Wikis and Social Networking
$29.00
The Internet is becoming increasingly embedded in everyday life. Drawing on an expanding array of intelligent web services and applications, a growing number of people are creating, distributing and exploiting user-created content (UCC) and being part of the wider participative web.

This study describes the rapid growth of UCC and its increasing role in worldwide communication, and draws out implications for policy. Questions addressed include: What is user-created content? What are its key drivers, its scope and different forms? What are the new value chains and business models? What are the extent and form of social, cultural and economic opportunities and impacts? What are the associated challenges? Is there a government role, and what form could it take?

What is the participative web?

The Internet is characterised by increased participation and interaction of users to communicate and express themselves. It is an Internet influenced by new intelligent web services enabling users to contribute to developing, rating, collaborating and distributing Internet content and developing and customising Internet applications, driven by an expanding broadband base and easy-to-use software to create and distribute content.



How is the participative web changing things?

The participative web is increasingly important in driving innovation in business, research and social activities. More open approaches to information creation, exchange and diffusion are also being taken up extensively in government, the education sector and other public domains. As new models for creation, distribution and use of digital content and information develop, new policy challenges for governments are emerging to provide an environment that enables and supports these developments.

Web 2.0: User-Generated Content in Online Communities: A theoretical and empirical investigation of its Determinants
$74.90
The number of Internet users is steadily growing. Currently, 55% of all Germans go online on a regular basis compared to 28% in 2001 - and there is no end in sight to this upward trend. Today's young people are growing up with the Internet and the Internet is growing up with them. It is evolving: the term for what is happening now in cyberspace is "Web 2.0", an expression coined at a conference in 2004 by the web-business mogul Tim O'Reilly, to describe a new evolutionary phase of the Internet. The phrase is shorthand for the second Internet boom, which now follows the one that ended in late 2001 with the biggest destruction of investors' capital in history. The bursting of the so-called dotcom bubble 6 years ago marked a turning point. At that time, many people concluded that the Internet was over-hyped. Bubbles and the subsequent shakeouts, however, appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. They have always marked the point at which real success stories developed their full scope and showed their strength. The defining feature of the current evolutionary phase of the web is that established companies are giving huge amounts of money to start-ups which have three things in common: they have grown from nowhere with astonishing speed; they often have no revenue stream to speak of; and most of their content is produced by their users. Google paid $1.65bn for the acquisition of Youtube, Rupert Murdochs's News Corp. bought Myspace for $ 580m, and Holzbrinck fully took over Studivz.net for about ? 85m, to give just a few examples of recent "Web 2.0 deals". What makes these so-called online communities so valuable? The answer to this question may be surprising: The deployed technologies are more or less the same as 6 years ago, but what all these new sites share is a new approach to creating things: "user-generated content", in the jargon. The Internet is no longer about corporations telling users what to do, think or buy; it is about the content people create themselves. Participation, not publishing, is the keyword. This development is particularly interesting for corporations which have noticed the importance and potential of the "do-it-yourself Web" as both a strategic marketing tool and a source of valuable information about consumer preferences and opinions. Tomorrow's consumers will no longer be interested in what companies say about their products and services, they will rely on opinions of other "normal" people. Chris Anderson, chief editor of Wired Magazine, states: "Your brand is what Google says about it. Not what you say about it". Corporations which have spent huge amounts of money on questionable market research projects in the past can get even better information for free in the future, as consumers and interested users exchange experiences and opinions about brands and products in online discussion forums anyway. As a result, marketing activities and product offers can be customized by gathering, processing and analyzing information about consumer preferences - it remains to be seen which companies will exploit these new opportunities and which will not. Very little is known about the factors that influence the content production. Often online communities fail because participation drops to zero - and nobody knows why. In order to maximize the participation level and, thereby, the benefits that can be drawn from their contributions, it is important to examine what drives people to produce content. Therefore, this thesis aims to identify the most important factors that influence the level of user-generated content production in online communities. More specifically, a comprehensive conceptual framework of the relevant determinants will be proposed and tested on an empirical basis. The results are supposed to serve as a guideline for researchers and community operators in the future.

User-Generated Content (At Issue Series)
$21.85
Too often I've seen this happen - a cutting-edge social media book becomes out of date a year after the publishing date. This 2007 book is no exception.

MySpace is given a lot of pages; Facebook is barely mentioned in passing. Texting as a social phenomenon is ignored, while Twitter is not named at all. LinkedIn, Wickipedia, uTube and Flickr get their due discussion, however, as does the possible future of podcasting.

The short chapters are set up as compare/contrast essays, for example, discussing the merits of the Wickipedia vs the Brittanica, whether blogging hurts or helps journalism and whether or not social networks are doomed to failure.

While these are all fascinating topics, the writing here is pedantic and scholarly. I had forgotten how much I dislike the academic voice. Reading this took me back to the days of college sociology assignments.

It's not that the information is useless - there are good points made in each chapter. And it's a quick read - I was able to start and finish this in one afternoon. I just feel that if someone is seeking of-the-moment information on social media, then a "just published" book might be more appropriate. Or better yet, seek current websites blogging about social media on the Internet!