How all of us are changing the web: Part 2

In my digibored post 'How all of us are changing the web: Part 1', I talked about User Generated Content (UGC) and Crowdsourcing and how we have used them to change the web as we know it today. This is a follow up; I’ve picked out a few common ways that we use UGC and crowdsourcing. There are plenty of others, but for digibored I only need a few to highlight my points. If you want a fuller list, wiki the terms.

1. Ratings and Reviews - UGC
2. Tagging Stuff - UGC
3. Citizen Science - Crowdsourcing
4. Citizen Media - Crowdsourcing

Ratings and Reviews

This is probably one of the most common forms of UGC. A lot of us shop online (figure here). I know personally, every time I make a purchase on Amazon or Ebay, I’m prompted to rate and review what I’ve bought. I know I often check user ratings because it’s damn confusing with the sheer number of similar products on offer. And it’s just not shopping when I use my local public library service, reserving books online, again I have the option to rate and review my loans. So what we think of our purchases are a vital resource in the online marketplace.

For example, a study by Comscore revealed that online user-generated reviews influence one in four of us when we are purchasing a product or service online (2007). That makes our ratings, our reviews very influential, in fact Williams & Co. add to this saying that:

1. “Research has shown that many people trust other people’s reviews more than they trust expert opinion”

2. “There is a strong relation between positive reviews of a product or service and satisfaction with sales” (2010, p118).

Tagging Stuff

Have you ever tagged something online? No, are you sure?

What about tagging people in one of your pictures on Facebook? Or how about retweeting posts and adding hashtags to entries, on Twitter? If you have done, then, you’ve generated content online.  

We can assign keywords to various content, whether that’s a document on a intranet, a blog, a picture or a video that we’ve uploaded. This started off as a metadata tagging where we could choose a preset word in an online database to describe an item to help it be found again when we search for it. It’s evolved into folksonomy, where we can tag something with our own words which is what we tend to on platforms like Flickr and YouTube (Vander Wal, 2007).

Point is that tagging helps us to find things easier online and in the case of twitter and other social networking sites, it allows us to recycle and reshare content (Huang et al., 2010).

Citizen Science

What is it about the worked ‘citizen’ it just makes me think of worker ants…

Talking of worker ants, the science research sector has successfully tapped into crowdsourcing to help create citizen science. We all get a chance to be scientists finally; putting to use that home lab kit you got as a present from your mum or dad when you were nine. Well, you get to use for something other than blowing up your bedroom …Sorry Mum…  

Anyway back to the topic, ‘Citizen Science’ is about the average person helping with research on a range of scientific subjects. For example, in some companies are using services Innocentive to place scientific challenges to an open audience and awarding a prize fee for the best solutions. We can also contribute by sharing our spare computing power to help create a free online open-source lab for researchers for things like cancer research etc. by downloading World Community Grid Software (Howe, 2006; The Marketer, 2011).

      Citizen Journalism

There’s that ‘citizen’ word again. This time it’s being used by the media. ‘Citizen Journalism’ has become an extremely popular and vital resource in today’s day and age. It lets us report events as they happen. Essentially, citizen journalism involves “a wide range of activities in which everyday people contribute information or commentary about news events” (Educause, 2007).
     

Citizen journalism is used by major news providers like the BBC and CNN, as well as amateur news sites such as Cyber Journalist as well as blogs and video sharing sites. In fact Twitter posts are the main source of information via the Google real-time service (Educause, 2007, Google, N.D.).

Richard Sambrook, a BBC journalist summed up the benefit of citizen journalism in 2009 saying that “when major events occur, the public can offer us as much new information as we are able to broadcast to them. From now on, news coverage is a partnership”

Lets sum up

I’ve told you four ways that I think have helped us all to change the web, its nots a complete list, its not meant to be. In fact UGC and crowdsourcing aren’t the only ways that we are making web better, but like I said in my last digibored post there are two drivers. There are not perfect, in fact they have a few flaws i.e.  citizen journalism has been criticised for accuracy. The stories posted on  the CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport site “are not edited, fact checked or screened before they are posted” Despite their flaws, UGC and crowdsourcing are helping us to improve the web and its us using our ability to create content online that is helping to change the web. 


Hey, if you wanna read more about crowdsourcing, check out 'Here Comes Everybody' by Clay Shirky. A lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University recomended it to me and it really got me into this subject.

Next post -  I'm switching pace and topics with my next digibored post... see you next time!

References

CNN, n.d. CNN iReport. [online] Available at: <http://ireport.cnn.com/> [Accessed 15 February 2011].

COMSCORE, 2007. Online Consumer-Generated Reviews Have Significant Impact on Offline Purchase Behaviour. [online] Available at: <http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2007/11/Online_Consumer_Reviews_Impact_Offline_Purchasing_Behavior> [Accessed 21 February 2011].

EDUCAUSE, 2007. 7 things you should know about citizen journalism. [online] Educause. Available at: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7031.pdf [Accessed 23 February 2011].

Google, n.d. See what's new for Realtime Search.[online] Available at:  <http://www.google.com/landing/realtime/> [Accessed 24 February 2011].

HOWE, J., 2006b. The Rise of Crowdsourcing, wired magazine. [online] Available at:  <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html> [Accessed 21 February 2011].

HUANG, J., THORNTON, K.M. and Efthimiadis, E.N., 2010. Conversational Tagging in Twitter, HT’10, pp13–16, [online] Available at: http://jeffhuang.com/Final_TwitterTagging_HT10.pdf [Accessed 1 March 2011].

SAMBROOK, R., 2009. Citizen Journalism and the BBC, [online] Available at: <http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100542> [Accessed 25 February 2011].