The New Wisdom of the Web 167
theodp writes "In a cover story, Newsweek takes a look at the new wave of start-ups cashing in on the next stage of the Internet by Putting The 'We' in Web. Sites built on user-generated content like YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Digg and Facebook have all taken a page from Tom Sawyer's playbook, engaging the community to do their work, prompting Google CEO Eric Schmidt to suggest he finds MySpace more interesting than Microsoft."
User generated content = quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course its worth it - Spending time in a community of like minded people is always worth it.
You have made 38 comments here (relative newbie), theres people with thousands of postings and reading loads of stories (myself included) and spending time here because this feels better than sitting bored watching tv - its interactive.
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:1)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
It's quite "newbie"-like to measure somebodies experience on the amount of posts he/she has on a website. Slashdot is not so much a user generated content site, as most the articles linked to are NOT at the site here; are most of the time NOT created by the people visiti
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Not that I know off - I did not "just create an account" to reply here; omfg. I don't give a shit what you do or don't think of me; I could care less, but I don't want to try, too much effort.
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:4, Insightful)
Million monkeys... (Score:1)
Are you one of the monkeys?
Re:Million monkeys... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Million monkeys... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
But can you tell where the bullseye is, by looking at the distribution of darts?
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2, Insightful)
But can you tell where the bullseye is, by looking at the distribution of darts?
Actually, I think you probably can.
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
That depends, can all the other darts point to the one in the bullseye and say: "Hey, look at the cool thing he did."?
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
You can approximate it, when each dart is provided additional metadata like user rankings and tags.
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
You'll find that there are far more points clustered around treble twenty than the bull's eye, I think.
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
It seems to take time for the large majority of people to embrace a really new opinion on something. For example, a new idea might be totally correct and plausible, yet its acceptance has to spread through
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
So in our analogy, the bullseye is the truth, and the million darts are public opinion as represented by blogs. We think that by analysing enough opinions, we can do some statistics, find a peak or average, and discover the truth.
Problem is, imagine mapping public opinion onto the bullseye problem. The target would be obscured behind dense smoke, and there would be several brightly illum
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Heh. I don't think that a dartboard can even hold a hundred darts. That means that 99.99% of the darts can't even *hit* the dartboard.
It would be pretty funny to see though!
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
In my understanding, this is precisely the purpose of Social Bandwagon Blogmarking 2.0. You Digg stories, rate Youtube videos, and you trep the trepfodder.com troploast and so on.
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
Google's AdSense has made this method of doing sites MUCH more lucrative for everyone in that you don't have generic, blanket advertising for every user's space, and if you want targeted ads, you don't
Re:User generated content = quality? (Score:2)
The user generated content isn't the key (Score:2)
It's easy to create a big repository of user-generated content. The key to success is to provide a service which makes it easy to sort the junk from the good stuff. This involves creating algorithms either for figuring out what's good or allowing users to rate things with minimal abuse possibilities. It's a hard thing to get right, and the most successful sites are the ones that do.
what's not to love? (Score:4, Interesting)
what's not to love?-Ads+"/."=? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:what's not to love? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just the theft (Score:5, Informative)
Just that it essentially boils down to theft. These sites are using copyright against the users, by having them submit content under the site owner's choice of license. Often, users are not aware of this. As a result, they see no difference between open sites and closed ones, and move between them based on nothing more than popularity.
Of course, those of us who know better look for a GFDL license, and find it on sites like Wikipedia, or one of the more Free Creative Commons licenses. One day, there will probably be a law that the licensing must be very clear to anyone who submits content, and hopefully everyone will prefer the sites where the content belongs to THEM.
Re:Just the theft (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just the theft (Score:3, Funny)
I thought stealing content wasn't theft? Boy, now I'm confused...
mod parent down (Score:2)
Re:mod parent down (Score:2)
Re:what's not to love? (Score:1)
orkut (Score:1)
Re:orkut (Score:1)
TWO YEARS i've waited... Is it worth it? How should I know? Nothing is public about it - at all!
So, if you are a member of Orkut, and you read this message, hit me up! I'm very curious!
Re:orkut (Score:4, Informative)
I've had an account there almost since the beginning, and it's horrific. The UI is ugly. The site is prone to crashes, to making duplicate posts, to telling you that your attempt at posting failed (it actually succeeded! surprise!). My gaming group originally had a community there for the homebrew system we played, but we all eventually stopped using the site, due to it being a gigantic suckhole of poor code and design.
Re:orkut (Score:1)
Re:orkut (Score:2)
When I tried to log in just now, it asked me for my Google Account username/password. So clearly it is not entirely independent of Google.
Re:orkut (Score:2)
more interesting than microsoft (Score:1, Funny)
I agree though, user generated content means that users will be more likely to frequent the site.
More heads are wiser than one (Score:4, Interesting)
The other piece I like here is also from Craigslist guy, about not having to charge everybody. This reminds me of what I did with Simpy (see this Simpy + AdSense bit [simpy.com], and pay attention to the Q&A towards the end of the entry). People have been very happy with the simplicity of this concept, and no user has complained about ads - they don't see them... but others do!
This doesn't make senese... (Score:3, Funny)
Where's the "we" in "you"? If it's going to be about "you", that means all the "me" baby boomers are finally getting out of the picture. Does that mean there's no "I" in "we"? I'm confused.
DON'T READ PARENT (Score:2)
Whoever modded it up needs to be $rblfed or $rblmed or whatever it was called. Don't make me crack open the DMCA!
Re: (Score:2)
Making a redundant free browser contributes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More interesting from whose perspective? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:More interesting from whose perspective? (Score:2)
A quick visit over to netcraft shows that they use Windows 2003 for their app servers. Although most of the site is built using Cold Fusion, I did find this link for their browse capability.
http://browseusers.myspace.com/browse/browse.aspx? &MyToken=2d8ec518-6e53-4dc1-a3ff-9b0656788162 [myspace.com]
Thus, they are also using .NET
user generated content inevitable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:user generated content inevitable (Score:2, Funny)
Re:user generated content inevitable (Score:2)
Re: open source and web rush 2.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, I'm disappointed that, with all of these social network oriented sites popping up, and all these new technologies being explored by commercial enterprises, that the open source community hasn't stepped up to the plate and offered free alternatives. Gmail? Flickr? Del.icio.us? Myspace?
I know the open source community can build reusable software that's as good or better than any of this, so why haven't we? Why are we still using SquirrelMail?
Re: open source and web rush 2.0 (Score:2)
"My pet name for it is Web 2.0 Katamari."
Re: open source and web rush 2.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
Roundcube (Score:2)
Send Them Money.
Re: open source and web rush 2.0 (Score:2)
Re: open source and web rush 2.0 (Score:2)
Make it easy for people to contribute. Make it beneficial to them. Instead of making them add to your big code base, have an API that they can hook their own stuff in to. Make it a no brainer to be part of i
Re: open source and web rush 2.0 (Score:2)
The appleseed site you're looking at was just the site explaining the project.
There's a test site at http://www.appleseedproject.org/ [appleseedproject.org] but that's currently down.
Re: open source and web rush 2.0 (Score:1)
Nice to see imeem getting a mention (Score:2, Informative)
As a company imeem is doing good things for open source, I see that they're really pushing the development of mono, part
How Many Of These Sites are Fads? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How Many Of These Sites are Fads? (Score:2)
Take another social networking site: Yelp [yelp.com] and the content is somewhat different. It is focused on store and restaurant reviews. Still somewhat fad-based, but the information is perhaps a bit longer-lasting than that for a local band. And maybe more useful for travel.
Basically, it depends
Re:How Many Of These Sites are Fads? (Score:2)
Honestly, MySpace is no worse than Friendster or the Facebook would be if those sites allowed you the range and freedom of expression MySpace does with HTML tags and embedded objects. Yes, you can take that freedom and use it to shoot yourself in the foot, but you can also build profiles of astonishing beauty and elegance. I think it's pretty cool--I just wish more sites let the user hack around with them like that.
It's only usability... (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO - The "difference" between now and 1994 are just Demographics and Usability:
* Nowadays, we have much more people online than in 1994, 1998, or 2001.
* Back in 1994 you had to be a computer whiz to post photos/videos, etc... most "business" built then assumed their users had some kind of "computer skills" normal people usually lack of.
*IF* you lower your product entry barrier (making it easy to use), WHILE there's more and more audience available, you're business will likely succeed
Re:It's only usability... (Score:4, Insightful)
You could communicate with people far away instantly (hello telephone).
You could write or receive written content from fiends / work for a long time (letters are pretty old stuff).
The only "difference" between those and 1930 is just Usability / Demographics / Price.
Demographics and Usability are EVERYTHING (specially since they are key factor to price )
Haha. (Score:2)
To take the Tom Sawyer comparison a step further.. (Score:4, Interesting)
profitable? (Score:1)
deviantART someone? (Score:1)
Nor about SourceForge, which is also a great user-created content website, although it's left to the geeky "elite"
Re:Actually, Digg wasn't mentioned in the article. (Score:2)
The 'We' in Web (Score:4, Funny)
youTube (Score:2)
Re:youTube (Score:2)
1. Setup Community oriented website
2. Get tons of users
3. ???
4. PROFIT!!
My guess is 3 is sell your e-mail address or other information. I didn't start getting spam on one of my e-mail addresses until I signed up for myspace *looks around accusingly*. Never used youTube though, so what is #3?
Re:youTube (Score:2)
This was bound to happen...... (Score:3, Interesting)
Once it becomes a part of the social life of humans, it will necessarily need to become socially oriented, or it will be relegated to the same place that books explaining air bags go. If you have been keeping up with wireless news around the world, with news of the Internet around the world, you will not be surprised by this. The one really good thing that social networking sites have going for them.... they really didn't have to hype it much... no FUD, no 'smoke n mirrors', no 30 second commercials, no billboards. The sites just work, and news spread by word of mouth... I understand that in some circles, if you don't have a myspace address, some teens just don't know how to relate to you... in other words, it was adapted so quickly, and so readily, that not being part of it is a sort of self imposed ostrisization.
Anyway, to me, its not a surprise at all, and if the reality lives up to the hype, the semantic web, and some of the web 2.0 stuff will make the world a very different place. I can see a future where a teen, in her friends car gets a text message on her phone, and pleads over the phone to get her friends mom to spend $80 on shoes that just went on sale at xyz-store, and her mom to pay her back later. Yes, I foresee changes in social interaction on many levels if we get the next generation of the Internet correct.
Could just be a fad (Score:4, Insightful)
The "hey, if we give it away, we'll get eyeballs and mind share" concept is very 1999. There's only so much advertising revenue possible, since sellers have finite advertising budgets which are some fraction of their sales. An increase in one area means a decrease somewhere else. Or, more likely, lower advertising prices. Look what happened to banner ad pricing. And now Microsoft wants in. The only thing that makes this work is if the users are doing all the work and the infrastructure is cheap to run.
The eBay model and the Yahoo Store model work, because they're involved in the transaction and do some of the work of making it happen, in exchange for a cut. They have a real revenue model.
Re:Could just be a fad (Score:5, Insightful)
You might have that mixed up. 5 + years ago, internet dating was totally uncool, now it's a fast growing multi-billion dollar industry and a logical avenue for meeting people (because lo and behold, it works) , and thusly socially acceptable.
Internet dating has never and will never be cool however, just like find a job or doing your income taxes has and will never be "cool". It's a facet of mortal existance, just done in a different way.
myspace ?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Flickr and digg are good examples. What about slashdot.org ? This is also driven entirely by the readers albeit with some strict moderation in accepting stories.
Re:myspace ?? (Score:2)
Slashdot ruins the illusion that is Web 2.0 by predating the term, possessing most of the characteristics and lacking all the superfluous technology.
It's not like the audience is doing all the work.. (Score:2)
LiveJournal is an extremely NON-trivial bit of software. It's easier to build Apache with OpenSSL and Frontpage extensions. And the dependencies! Oh the dependencies!
So while the nice people at LiveJournal headquarters are getting all this "free" content, they're spending copious amounts of time makin
Re:It's not like the audience is doing all the wor (Score:2)
Web 2.0 Share the Profits (Score:4, Interesting)
-CGP [colingregorypalmer.net]
Re:Web 2.0 Share the Profits (Score:2)
Of course MySpace is more interesting (Score:3, Funny)
User-generated content not new (Score:2, Insightful)
User-generated content has existed for years on EBay, Amazon, and even Slashdot. All of these sites understood that they could simply aggregate data and then distribute it. Ok, it's actually not that simple, especially for the larger sites, given the amount of logistics involved to coordinate it all. But it's been around far longer than MySpace or YouTube.
One of the dangers with this model, as others have pointed out, is the fallacy of collective intelligence, that we can some how vote on facts. Had Wikip
Re:Myspace sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Myspace sucks (Score:1, Funny)
The "Terms of Service" linked from the sign-up page links to a 404.
So I guess I can only agree to all of those terms.
Re:Myspace sucks (Score:1)
The latter is infinitely "better" to watch, but gets tedious after a while, but the former is always interesting, "interesting" as in Hollywood keeps putting that kind of footages in sci-fi movies.
Re:Myspace sucks (Score:2)
It shows myspace is all of its painful glory.
Re:Myspace sucks (Score:2)
Re:HyperHype bull (Score:2)
Welcome to 2006. The accountants are running the show now. Didn't you get the memo?
Cheers
Stor