The Future of User Generated Content

Of the 40 Million active Internet users in India, only 5% of them actually maintain a blog... of which only 1% of them have 'original' content (a quick math, it works to 20,000 people)

Quite sad...:(


An ideal case would be me... I try and update my blog regularly... but most of the time, it would be "copy & paste" job.. I find an interesting content on some site, and then copy it to my blog. Only once in a while there would a creative streak in me (like now:)), and i get going and type a 700 odd word item - which i can term as 'original'

Some online industry leaders were mentioning in the ongoing FICCI Frames convention about User Generated Content being the future of the online media... i am sceptical...

What do you mean by user generated content?... If i embed an YouTube video, onto my blog, will it be termed as UGC??
What if I take an article from some publisher portal and put in my blog, will it be considered an UGC?

In the Web2.0 scenario, we are most comfortable in just writing a 2 sentence 'scrap' or 'poke'..and this by no way can be termed as content... (usually, this is a friendly banter, or plain hello, hai messages)...

I strongly believe that the 'original content generators' would be by and far few. Only difference would be the exponential web pages where the same content would be displayed.... and with the RSS feeds, the work becomes more simpler:)

Like every society, as time goes by, things become more organised and controlled. So also would be the case of the Internet Society. As more control(through advances in technology) happens, then the outflow of content gets restricted, that is when most of the UGC becomes scarce and that is when it endangers the very survival of the many websites and blogs.


Until then, "cntrl C, Cntrl V" -:)

Cheers

Santosh

I came across few these interesting stats regarding blogs;(thanks to nirmaltv.com)


Blogging from came to the web in 1994 when Justin Hall created what is called the first blog ever- links.net which was a daily log of his life.
In 1999, Pyro labs launched Blogger (now owned by Google) as a free platform for blogging.
A Google search for blog yields 1460000000 results which shows the popularity of blogging.
There are around 400000 bloggers in India
It’s estimated that around $500 million is generated by top 50000 blogs.
Every hour 16000 blog posts are published and an average of 400000 posts a day.

Comments

Web Satan said…
He he he .... i would also agree upon the fact that its really a sad statistic abpout the blogging community. Well about how many people update their blogs I have a different opinion. All the IAMAI conferences we have been attending we have talked about content being the king. So I when it comes to producing a content there are a lot of options liek u saud copy paste and yeah we have content recylcing too. Content recylcing would a way where in we talk about the sam thing what some1 else hase writen about in our own fashion and we put in our own opinion, this makes the content more exciting and definitly gets its new identity.
3:04 PM
Web Satan said…
Hey forgot to mention my own blog....www.ashes2brands.com

hope to see you there too!
3:05 PM
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