Jon Udell picks ‘User Generated Content’ as his least favorite buzzword.
User suggests: adict.
Generated suggests: made automatically with no feeling.
Content, as Jon points out, suggests: the offal that fills a sausage.
What could be a more contemptuous view of a creation and its author?
This second wave of the Internet is distinguished principally by the fact that more people (ahem, users) are contributing.
Caring about these people and what they contribute, will provide genuinely useful services and any business model based upon the perceived cost benefit of cheap, user generated content, shows an inability to differentiate between poetry and the contents of a telephone book.
A celebrated Irish content generator defined a cynic as ‘someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’
A proponent of ‘building a platform to leverage cheap user generated content’ does not even know the market price, knowing merely the ‘cost’ of any random string of bits and the value of nothing’.
In the grand scheme of things this is below the level of the cynic. Someone who cannot calculate the difference between value and cost will not be able to make a profit, however cynically.
If anything should hang behind my desk and show what I really want to and don’t want to do with Wists it would be a smart little wall plaque embossed with:
Oscar Wilde didn’t produce ‘user generated content’, he knew its value.