O'Reilly Radar > Home Solar as User Generated Content
Great analogy. User generated content is clearly going to be key in both the physical and digital worlds, whether that distinction even makes sense anymore.
For me the most concrete example is media. Today we watch TV channels, read newspapers and consume other media that has been edited together into different and separate consolidations (Wall Street Journal, ESPN, etc).
Many of us also now get our content from family and friends (email, photos and videos), from individuals via blogs, youtube videos and podcasts.
DVRs such as Tivo and technologies such as on demand and iTunes have allowed us to break out of the edited streams of media we get from the TV broadcasters.
Community rating sites such as Digg have allowed us to find more relevant content for us. Amazon and Netflix have engines to help us find more content that we will be interested in.
Technologies such as RSS and readers and aggregates have allowed us to edit our own content together.
We will all want access to this personalized content via familiar mechanisms. It is unlikely that each of us will continue to do this discovery and aggregation ourselves. This will become a service that is provided to us just like our cable companies and news media do today.
What will it look like and who will own it? Good question. If I knew that I would be off doing it myself.
1 comment:
Once you needed a corporation in order to generate good content. It was expensive, it was difficult to produce and needed a distribution channel.
The old distribution model created the aggregation - the networks, channels with fixed programming, newspapers, etc.
Creation is now much simpler. Writing is more common, movie making is easier, etc. There's still a need for big budget for the huge effects and movie stars, but good content can be made without those.
The internet broke the distribution problem. Anyone can publish, anyone can find the content. As you said - the problem now is too much content.
I don't think any specific company will own that. There seem to be two models being created for finding content (beyond searching / browsing)
1. User-voted content - i.e. Digg, google's top 100 videos, etc.
2. People who browse the net and find what they like and blog about it. They are the personal aggregators. All consumers have to do is find a couple of these who's taste they like and follow their findings.
Post a Comment