As a 'digibored' person and an all round slow adopter, the fact that my presence on the web helps to develop it, hasn't completely escaped me. Sure I'm a little late to the party but I’m still contributing to the web by creating user generated content, in fact lots of us are!
Like it or not, we are a hot commodity, there's plenty of organisations and institutions that have clocked the impact users like us have on the web. And they are asking for our help to develop their businesses in a variety of ways. So this week, I’m going to talk about how all of us are helping to change the web by creating user generated content and how companies are harnessing that change through crowdsourcing.
Where do i begin?
Let’s start at looking at the web and what we could or couldn't do until recently. When I started surfing I was in the world of Web 1.0 it was a view only web, where information was pushed to users by a small number of content creators/experts. It was like jumping on a bus, where for the most part you let the driver tell you where you were going.
Then shiny Web 2.0 came along, being driven by us. It’s enabled us to collaborate with one another other and make contributions to it. Services on this web are now our platform, with the likes Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube encouraging us to create, recreate, mashup and share content. If user contribution and collaboration have made web 2.0 a possibility, User Generated Content and Crowdsourcing can be considered amongst its drivers (O'Reilly, 2005). (I'm not going to mention Web 3.0, I don't think we're there yet, we'll talk about it in another digibored post).
What’s User Generated Content (UGC)?
OECD defines UGC as “content made publicly available over the Internet, which reflects a certain amount of creative effort and which is created outside of professional routines and practices” (2007, p.4).
Clay Shirky (2010) reckons that we are changing the way we spend our free time, replacing passive participation in front of a TV by actively participating, creating content on the Internet. This cultural shift has increased our personal ambitions to express ourselves in a way TV cannot offer. So as a result, we are creating user generated content. Its not a new concept, people have created UGC pre-internet i.e. writing for the Newspaper reader sections and producing programming on public access channels on American cable television.
However on the ‘collaborative’ web, UGC has exploded, helped along by Technological, Social, Economic and Legal factors. Technological developments include faster online access, accessible software tools and an increase in UGC hosting websites have contributed to increase participation i.e. Blogger, YouTube etc. Social attitudes have also changed with the emergence of the ‘digital natives’ who have grown up with the Internet (Shirky, 2010; OECD, 2007).
Lower costs associated with UGC have helped to create new business models i.e. Threadless.com. Flexible approaches to copyright i.e. Creative Common licenses have also allowed easier adaptation and distribution of UGC (Howe, 2008; OECD, 2007).
So what’s crowdsourcing then?
Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing in a 2006 article for Wired magazine. He says that’s crowdsourcing “represents the act of a company or institution once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call…” (2006).
He says that “Crowd-sourcing isn’t synonymous with user-generated content, but it often involves building a business around it” (2008, p.177). In essence, UGC refers to content created by users independently whereas crowdsourcing involves companies persuading the crowd to perform tasks traditionally done by employees.
So this was a look, albeit a brief one at UGC and Crowdsourcing, I’m aware that I’ve thrown a lot of definitions at you. There will be a part two to this blog entry, where I’ll outline four ways UGC and crowdsourcing have enhanced the way that we use the web.
References
HOWE, J., 2006, Crowdsourcing: A Definition. Crowdsourcing, [Blog] Available at: <http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html> [Accessed 9 October 2011].
HOWE, J., 2008. Crowdsourcing, How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. London: Random House.
OECD, 2007. Participative Web: User-Created Content. [online] OECD. Available at: <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/57/14/38393115.pdf> [Accessed 10 October 2011].
O'Reilly, T., 2005, What is Web 2.0, [online] O'REILLY.COM. Available at: <http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html> [Accessed 10 October 2011].
SHIRKY, C., 2010. Cognitive Surplus, Creativity and Genorisity in a Connected Age. London: Penguin.
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