User Generated Content News & Articles

Is user-generated content all that it is cracked up to be?

Sure, some organizations have been very quick to exploit its appeal in an effort to adapt to the newest and hippest Web technology trends. While others (newspapers, for instance) linger, hesitant and skeptical of the benefit and subsequent outcome that adding wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 prospects, will bring.

For some time now, the jury has been vague is determining the impact — good or bad — that user-generated content (UGC) has had on social media and even more importantly, if it’s lived up to the hype of being the great equalizer, democracy-laden technology of the Web.

Ever since the birth of reality television and the subsequent rise of Web 2.0 technologies, user-generated content has become more popular. So popular in fact, that the news is now relying on it.

CNN announced that its ever-popular iReport is expanding itself in hopes of becoming the YouTube of cable news. While iReport has been around since 2006 and has received more than 100,000 news-related photo and video submissions, CNN rarely uses more than 10 percent of the content in its newscasts. That is of course because they’ve needed to check each story out for accuracy and other pesky newsy type information.

But no more…

When I think of Facebook, I think of the telephone. Stay with me. Not only do they both provide means for networking and communication, their development was also subject to conspiracy. You see, back in the day, many laid claim to status of its inventor. Much like the Harvard graduates, Divy Narendra and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who claim that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea. Now they know how Antonio Meucci felt.