5 Comments Add your own

• 1. oakling  |  March 8th, 2008 at 7:43 pm

  Eeenteresting. It seems to me that they have some valid points - people want to know that the information they are getting is solid - but yeah, the ways they are going about it aren’t going to have any effect on the vast swathes of YouTube and blogosphere type user-created stuff. Saying that some sites are making sure their content is written by people with some credentials and saying that the user-generated web is on its way out are veeeery different things.

  Personally, I find that sites like about.com, that try to do a magazine-style expert-authored thing, tend to dig themselves a real hole. By dividing the world into experts and, you know, READERS, they set up a dichotomy that leads them to dumb everything down horribly. Often I find that I know a lot more about a subject than their authors because I am a great researcher, and I get really tired of hearing the same super-basic over-processed pap about, you know, How To Avoid Getting The Flu This Season or whatever that is on the cover of every magazine anyway.

• 2. Howard Owens  |  March 8th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

  I’m about to push submit on my own fisking of this article. Thanks for point it out.

• 3. Jeremiah  |  March 9th, 2008 at 2:25 pm

  Cory, I think I disagree with you.

  The Newsweak article conflates a couple of ideas, but does so responsibly (IMHO). The Calcanis quote is right on: “The more trusted an environment, the more you can charge for it,”

  Howard Owens’ retort is less than convincing:
  “Here’s a problem, Wikipedia and YouTube are hugely popular, and continue to get more popular by the month.”

  Note to Howard: Popularity and Authority are not the same thing.

  “And here’s the other unexamined aspect of the Newsweek premise: The reason so-called expert-vetted sites are getting funded is because they’re differentiated from existing sites. No smart VC is going to fund a copycat business plan.”

  Ahem: Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, BMW, Mercedes……

  There’s a huge demand for authoritative sources. All of the ‘MSM’s credibility and authority were squandered long ago, so there’s a vacuum.

  No amateur is an authority: by proxy of *being* an authority, one is a professional.

  *one minor note about the ubiquitous references to YouTube as an example of user-generated-content: Practically everything that’s getting high-views on YouTube is produced by professionals and uploaded (illegally) by users. Let’s just be honest about that.

• 4. Z  |  March 9th, 2008 at 4:36 pm

  There are certain things that user-generated content will almost always remain entertaining and useful.

  There are also certain things that user-generated content will almost never be able to replace or supplant.

  YouTube is, in the end, not the best example for user-generated content because, as Jeremiah points out correctly, the vast majority of what’s popular are things either done by professionals or illegally uploaded items done by professionals. Lots of people upload things–the vast majority are never seen beyond a dozen people.

• 5. Rocker  |  March 10th, 2008 at 6:23 am

  I think the point is that UGC will not ultimately displace professional content - they are different animals and will co-exist. That is hard to dispute. Maybe the point is also to calm down everyone running around screaming “UGC! UGC! UGC!”. That is very refreshing.

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