Content: it's like rock n' roll

The first session of the afternoon (stream A) covered the issue of user-created content i.e. what people stick up on the Internet. What became clear was that this subject – like music – produces a generational split.

On the one side, you have the younger generation: excited about the new possibilities, dismissing concerns as people not "getting it" but with a dramatic tendency to over-emphasise its importance. And on the other side: the older, wiser generation, but one that also struggles to understand exactly why people are so excited about it and so is overly cautious and occasionally dismissive.

What everyone can be sure of is that modern technology has allowed people to produce words and videos at an easier and faster rate than ever before, and the Internet has enabled people to share that publicly with as many people as never before. Or, most concisely, user-created content is here to stay.

So what?

The chair Michael LeBlanc kicked off the session with an interesting anecdote – he received dreadful service from a company, so he called to complain and nothing happened. He emailed and they were unhelpful. He tried to find a way of posting a complaint on their website – but there wasn’t a forum.

So he posted his complaint – in strong words – on his own blog. And now that post is extremely visible through Google whereas if he had just posted on the company’s website, it would have been subsumed by other comments. The upshot was that the company called him up a long time later to ask how they could help him and if he would remove the content.

In this context, it’s not hard to see the impact of the user-created content.


My generation

This discussion thread was dropped however when the next few panellists – the younger generation – gave presentations not on the impact that this content has, but on how terrific it was and what they were doing with it on their terrific websites.

The generational gap was then further highlighted when the last panellist took issue with even the term “user-create content” – which by now had inevitably been reduced to down to “UCC”. There is nothing new to this concept, Manon Ress argued, newspaper editorials are user-generated content, and graffiti is user-generated content. The problem, she says, is that this new terminology values all “content” as of equal value when it isn’t.

She also complained that among this wealth of content, there were no databases being created. “Have we seen evidence-based policies?”

But Ress had a different point to make, and that was the way in which this data/content/stuff is stored. If the process isn’t open and transparent and if the standards aren’t open, the information is going to decline and die, she argued. She also had a list of questions that people should consider before they start producing and hosting content: Is the data open and transparent? Can I store it? What is the interface?

It is, of course, the concern of the mature that information is retained, lessons are learnt and then clearly and carefully passed down; whereas the young are too busy enjoying being creative to worry about what the use or value of what they are producing is.

So where did the discussion get to?

“It is easy to make a blog,” LeBlanc summed up. “If a nine year old can start a blog, a government official can certainly start a blog.” Here’s betting that government officials’ content would use open standards and fit neatly into a database.