The key points of this article (published on Sunday 11th March 2007, 'The Observer') are:
- An example of user-generated content: a passenger of a derailed train took a picture from inside the carriage to the BBC!!!
- The London bombings on 7th July 2005 marked the first time we had seen such content impact on traditional news media in Britain.
- In the chaos of the situations, due to the authorities restricting access, networks found themselves unable to cope and were desperate for any footage and imagery.
- A lot of it was striking , moving and informative, but some was tasteless and even ghoulish.
- Last year, enough digital information was generated to fill a dozen stacks of hardback books stretching from the earth to the sun.
- The world's total digital content last year amounted to 161 billion gigabytes - enough to fill 161 billion iPod Shuffles!
- Researchers predict that by 2010 more than 70 per cent of all the digital content in the world will have been created by consumers.
- Optimists see it as a great release of human creativity.
- Cynics see user-generated content movement as just vanity publishing on steroids.
- Sceptics ask: "who is going to pay for the bandwidth needed to host video streams and blogs?"
- Media moguls see that all that remains is to devise a way of 'monetising it.
- Personally, I predict that the first step towards this will be in the form of advertising. The most downloaded blogs or videos will have businesses advertising on them.
- I also predict that the second step towards this will be that blogs will contain some free information, but then users will have to pay to see the whole of the blog and more stories. Eg, a news blog showing the headline and standfirst for free, but readers have to pay to see the whole article.
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