For instance, the BBC’s ‘WW2 Peoples War’ site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/) gathered an incredible range of first person accounts of the war. This was a hugely valuable experience to the people who contributed, and also makes for valuable reading. The range means, for example, you can read stories from people living in your area.

Let’s take another example. User generated content in news. Whilst for the most part, much of news is predictable, or PRed, or researchable, all of which can be handled by a professional news team, there are some news events that just happen suddenly, unexpectedly. It’s impossible for a news team to be everywhere at once, so by opening up to contributions from the public, you can get a greater breadth of coverage.

For most established websites - cultural, news, media - ‘doing’ user generated content should mean giving careful consideration to what you’re doing it for, including why people would want to contribute, and why people would want to read it. YouTube, Flickr, etc don’t have any specific call-to-action, other than just ‘upload your stuff’. This makes the quality, and type of content hugely variable, but they benefit from the huge range and network effects.

Basically, most of us producing websites shouldn’t be trying to replicate what Flickr and YouTube, but should be linking to the best examples/groups/communities on those sites, and running our own UGC projects which are much more highly targeted.

The examples listed here are good ones. Flickr has its “interestingness” and very clever it is too. But that’s not to say that there aren’t other good pictures that it doesn’t pick up - stark differences between colours certainly seem to help your picture become more “interesting.”

And the BBC News example really reflects how we read news in an offline world. The broadsheets generally have the “better” news, but tabloids sell more. Even if everyone is reading about a man marrying a goat, I’d rather not have that as the lead story thanks.

We do need guides to help us wade through all that material constantly being produced, and in an older world that was the job of an editor. It’s a human being who determines what stories appear where in a newspaper, and indeed, on the BBC website. Google News, on the other hand, doesn’t use an editor - yet it’s effectively relying on lots of editors on lots of other news sites to determine what’s really important. Otherwise the lead story would always be Hugh Grant throwing baked beans at a photographer or similar.

Who those editors are is where it really gets difficult. In general I want small groups of editors, not the vast unwashed. Leaving things to the public at large means we end up with films like Norbit. A single editor might not be to your liking, but that’s not a problem. Go away and find someone who does agree with your sensibilities.

It’s the problem I have with Digg and its ilk - you simply end up with a cocktail of stories of a particular flavour. If that’s what you want then fine.

James, you have a sidebar of links to stories that you find interesting. If several of my friends were to have similar sets of links, then perhaps that could act as a quasi-Digg service - in this instance recommending internet and media related topics. Another set of friends might point me in the direction of sports, and another set science stories.

But someone needs to get out there and find those stories in the first place, like the sub-editor who reads monitors the stories coming in off the wire services in a newsroom.

And finally, I do want to be surprised from time to time. I tend not to personalise news sites too much to just give me what I know I’m interested in. If all I read are tech and media stories, then my life will be poorer for it. I may skim over some sections that I’m not so interested in, but once in a while you do read something you’d never have considered reading had it not been in front of you, and you might just be a little better for it.

http://www.squeezypaws.com/?p=919

>> I wonder, and whisper this, whether she might have a point after all.

I have this nagging suspicion that most of the people saying things like the woman you talk about are people who have managed to get away with calling themselves “creative” by putting on airs and graces. They are not horrified that the masses now have publishing tools *per se*, they are horrified that they themselves are about to be found out.

>> I’ve managed to post this drivel quite successfully without anyone else checking over it for any redeeming quality

Me too, but to be honest I yearn for a sub-editor and someone who will write me a style guide so I can be consistent about whether I write things like web site or web-site or website.