User-generated content (UGC), also known as Consumer generated media (CGM) or user-created content (UCC),[1] refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users Economics and commerce define an end-user as the person who uses a product. The end-user or consumer may differ from the person who purchases the product. For instance, if a zookeeper purchases elephant food the purchaser of the product is different than the end-user of that product.
The term user generated content entered mainstream usage during 2005 having arisen in web publishing and new media New media is a term meant to encompass the emergence of digital, computerized, or networked information and communication technologies in the later part of the 20th century. Most technologies described as "new media" are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible, interactive and content production circles. Its use for a wide range of applications, including problem processing, news News is the communication of information on current events which is presented by print, broadcast, Internet, or word of mouth to a third party or mass audience, gossip Gossip is idle talk or rumour, especially about the personal or private affairs of others. It forms one of the oldest and most common means of sharing facts and views, but also has a reputation for the introduction of errors and other variations into the information transmitted. The term also carries implications that the news so transmitted ( and research Research can be defined as the search for knowledge or as any systematic investigation to establish facts. The primary purpose for applied research is discovering, interpreting, and the development of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge on a wide variety of scientific matters of our world and the universe. Research can use, reflects the expansion of media production through new technologies that are accessible and affordable to the general public. All digital media technologies are included, such as question-answer databases, digital video Digital video is a type of video recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal. The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article, blogging, podcasting A podcast is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication. The word usurped webcast in common vernacular, due to rising popularity of the iPod and the innovation of web feeds, mobile phone photography A camera phone is a mobile phone which is able to capture either still photographs or video. Since early in the 21st century the majority of cameras and of mobile phones in use are camera phones. Most camera phones are simpler than separate digital cameras. Their usual fixed focus lenses and smaller sensors limit their performance in poor lighting, and wikis Wikis may exist to serve a specific purpose, and in such cases, users use their editorial rights to remove material that is considered "off topic." Such is the case of the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia. In contrast, open purpose wikis accept content without firm rules as to how the content should be organized. In addition to these technologies, user generated content may also employ a combination of open source Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Before the term open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; open source, free software Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer-, and flexible licensing The verb license or grant licence means to give permission. The noun licence refers to that permission as well as to the document memorializing that permission or related agreements to further reduce the barriers to collaboration Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership can be social within a, skill-building A skill is the learned capacity to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of work, some general skills would include time management, teamwork and leadership, self motivation and others, whereas and discovery Discovery is the act of detecting something new. With reference to science and academic disciplines, discovery is the observation of new phenomena, new actions, or new events and providing new reasoning to explain the knowledge gathered through such observations with previously acquired knowledge from abstract thought and everyday experience.
Sometimes UGC can constitute only a portion of a website. For example on Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. is an American-based multinational electronic commerce company. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it is America's largest online retailer, with nearly three times the Internet sales revenue of the runner up, Staples, Inc., as of January 2010 the majority of content is prepared by administrators A system administrator, systems administrator, or sysadmin, is a person employed to maintain and operate a computer system and/or network. System administrators may be members of an information technology or Electronics and Communication Engineering department, but numerous user reviews of the products being sold are submitted by regular visitors to the site.
Often UGC is partially or totally monitored by website administrators to avoid offensive content or language, copyright infringement issues, or simply to determine if the content posted is relevant to the site's general theme.
However, there has often been little or no charge for uploading user generated content. As a result, the world's data centers are now replete with exabytes of UGC that, in addition to creating a corporate asset, may also contain data that can be regarded as a liability.[2][3][4]
General requirements
The advent of user-generated content marked a shift among media organizations from creating online content to providing facilities for amateurs to publish their own content.
User generated content has also been characterized as 'Conversational Media' The term citizen media refers to forms of content produced by private citizens who are otherwise not professional journalists. Citizen journalism, participatory media and democratic media are related principles, as opposed to the 'Packaged Goods Media' of the past century Mass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a large audience. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such as books and manuscripts had already been in use for centuries.[citation needed] The former is a two-way process in contrast to the one-way distribution of the latter. Conversational or two-way media is a key characteristic of so-called Web 2.0 The term "Web 2.0" is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, which encourages the publishing of one's own content and commenting on other people's.
The role of the passive audience therefore has shifted since the birth of New Media, and an ever-growing number of participatory users are taking advantage of the interactive opportunities, especially on the Internet to create independent content. Grassroots experimentation then generated an innovation in sounds, artists, techniques and associations with audiences which then are being used in mainstream media.[5] The active, participatory and creative audience is prevailing today with relatively accessible media, tools and applications, and its culture is in turn affecting mass media corporations and global audiences.
The OECD The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is an international economic organisation of 32 countries. It defines itself as a forum of countries committed to democracy and the market economy, providing a setting to compare policy experiences, seeking answers to common problems, identifying good practices, and co-ordinating domestic has defined three central schools for UGC:
- Publication requirement: While UGC could be made by a user and never published online or elsewhere, we focus here on the work that is published in some context, be it on a publicly accessible website or on a page on a social networking site only accessible to a select group of people (eg, fellow university students). This is a useful way to exclude email, two-way instant messages and the like.
- Creative effort: This implies that a certain amount of creative effort was put into creating the work or adapting existing works to construct a new one; i.e. users must add their own value to the work. UGC often also has a collaborative element to it, as is the case with websites which users can edit collaboratively. For example, merely copying a portion of a television show and posting it to an online video website (an activity frequently seen on the UGC sites) would not be considered UGC. If a user uploads his/her photographs, however, expresses his/her thoughts in a blog, or creates a new music video, this could be considered UGC. Yet the minimum amount of creative effort is hard to define and depends on the context.
- Creation outside of professional routines and practices: User generated content is generally created outside of professional routines and practices. It often does not have an institutional or a commercial market context. In extreme cases, UGC may be produced by non-professionals without the expectation of profit or remuneration. Motivating factors include: connecting with peers, achieving a certain level of fame, notoriety, or prestige, and the desire to express oneself.
Mere copy & paste or a link In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to a document that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically[citation needed]. The reference points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. Such text is usually viewed with a computer. A software system for viewing and could also be seen as user generated self-expression. The action of linking to a work or copying a work could in itself motivate the creator, express the taste of the person linking or copying. Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com, leaptag.com is a good example where such linkage to work happens. The culmination of such linkages could very well identify the tastes of a person in the community and make that person unique.
Adoption and recognition by mass media
The British Broadcasting Corporation The British Broadcasting Corporation is the largest broadcasting organisation in the world. The BBC is an autonomous public service broadcaster that operates under a Royal Charter. Within the UK, it is funded principally by an annual television licence fee, which is charged to all United Kingdom households, companies and organisations using any set up a user generated content team as a pilot in April 2005 Categories: April | 2005 | Days in 2005 with 3 staff. In the wake of the 7 July 2005 London bombings The 7 July 2005 London bombings, also known as 7/7, were a series of coordinated suicide attacks on London's public transport system during the morning rush hour. The bombings were carried out by four Muslim men, three of British Pakistani and one of British Jamaican descent, who were motivated by Britain's involvement in the Iraq War and the Buncefield oil depot fire The 2005 Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal fire was caused by a series of explosions early on the morning of Sunday 11 December 2005. The terminal, generally known as the Buncefield Depot, is an oil storage facility located near the M1 motorway on the edge of Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, England. News reports described the incident as the, the team was made permanent and was expanded, reflecting the arrival in the mainstream of the 'citizen journalist'. After the Buncefield disaster The 2005 Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal fire was caused by a series of explosions early on the morning of Sunday 11 December 2005. The terminal, generally known as the Buncefield Depot, is an oil storage facility located near the M1 motorway on the edge of Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, England. News reports described the incident as the the BBC received over 5,000 photos from viewers. The BBC does not normally pay for content generated by its viewers.
In 2006 2006 was a common year that started on a Sunday. In the Gregorian calendar, it was the 2006th year of the Common Era, or of Anno Domini; the 6th year of the 3rd millennium and of the 21st century; and the 7th of the 2000s decade CNN Cable News Network, almost always referred to by its initialism CNN, is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States. While the news channel has numerous affiliates, CNN primarily launched CNN iReport, a project designed to bring user generated news content to CNN. Its rival Fox News Channel Fox News Channel , commonly referred to as Fox News or Fox, is a cable and satellite news channel owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation. As of April 2009, it is available to 102 million households in the United States and further to viewers internationally, broadcasting primarily out of its New York City studios launched its project to bring in user-generated news, similarly titled "uReport". This was typical of major television news organisations in 2005-2006, who realised, particularly in the wake of the 7th July bombings, that citizen journalism Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information. Authors Bowman and Willis say: "The intent of this could now become a significant part of broadcast news. Sky News Sky News is a 24-hour based domestic and international satellite television news broadcaster with an emphasis on UK and international news stories, for example, regularly solicits for photographs and video from its viewers.
User generated content was featured in Time magazine's 2006 Person of the Year The tradition of selecting a Man of the Year began in 1927, with Time editors contemplating newsworthy stories possible during a slow news week. The idea was also an attempt to remedy the editorial embarrassment earlier that year for not having aviator Charles Lindbergh on its cover following his historic trans-Atlantic flight. By the end of the, in which the person of the year was "you", meaning all of the people who contribute to user generated media such as YouTube and Wikipedia.
Motivation and incentives
While the benefit derived from user generated content for the content host is clear, the benefit to the contributor is less direct. There are various theories behind the motivation for contributing user generated content, ranging from altruistic, to social, to materialistic. Due to the high value of user generated content, many sites user incentives to encourage their generation. These incentives can be generally categorized into implicit incentives and explicit incentives.[6]
- Implicit incentives: These incentives are not based to anything tangible. The most common form of implicit incentives is social incentives. These incentives allow the user to feel good as an active member of the community. These can include relationship between users, such as Facebook Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc., with more than 500 million active users in July 2010.[N 1] Users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks’s friends, or Twitter Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., that enables its users to send and read other users' messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery’s followers. Another common social incentive are status, badges or levels within the site, something a user earns when they reach a certain level of participation which may or may not come with additional privileges. Yahoo Answers is a good example of this type of social incentive. Social incentives are great in the way it cost the host site very little and can catalyzes viral growth, however, their very nature requires a sizable existing community before it can function.
- Explicit incentives: These incentives refer to something tangible, examples include financial payment, entry into a contest, a voucher, coupon, frequent traveler miles. Direct explicit incentives are easily understandable by most and have immediate value regardless of the community size;[6] sites such as the Canadian shopping platform Wishabi Wishabi is a Canadian online shopping platfom that is owned and maintained by the Wishabi corporation. Wishabi's mission is "to give Canadians the best tools to make informed shopping decisions" and Amazon Mechanical Turk The Amazon Mechanical Turk is one of the suites of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables computer programmers (known as Requesters) who are located in the United States to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. The Requesters are able to pose tasks known as HITs both uses this type of financial incentive in slightly different ways to encourage user participation. The drawback to explicit incentives is that it may cause the user to be subject to the overjustification effect, eventually believing the only reason for the participating is for the explicit incentive.[6] This reduces the influence of the other form of social or altruistic motivations, making it increasingly costly for the content host to retain long-term contributors.[7]
Different types of user generated content
- Discussion boards An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site. It originated as the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board, and a technological evolution of the dialup bulletin board system. From a technological standpoint, forums or boards are web applications managing user-generated content
- Blogs A blog is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a
- Wikis Wikis may exist to serve a specific purpose, and in such cases, users use their editorial rights to remove material that is considered "off topic." Such is the case of the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia. In contrast, open purpose wikis accept content without firm rules as to how the content should be organized
- Social networking sites A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services
- Advertising Advertising is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience to purchase or take some action upon products, ideals, or services. It includes the name of a product or service and how that product or service could benefit the consumer, to persuade a target market to purchase or to consume that particular brand. These brands are usually
- Fanfiction Fan fiction is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator. Works of fan fiction are rarely commissioned or authorized by the original work's owner, creator, or publisher; also, they are almost never professionally published. Fan
- News Sites
- Trip planners
- Memories
- Mobile Photos & Videos
- Customer review sites A review site is a website on which reviews can be posted about people, businesses, products, or services. These sites may use Web 2.0 techniques to gather reviews from site users or may employ professional writers to author reviews on the topic of concern for the site. Early review sites included Epinions.com and Amazon.com.[citation needed]
- Experience or photo sharing sites
- Any other website that offers the opportunity for the user to share their knowledge and familiarity with a product or experience
- Audio
- Video games
- Maps and location systems
|
Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:38:26 GMT+00:00
RIA Novosti MOSCOW, August 23 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's state grain trader United Grain Company ( UGC ) has started domestic grain supplies with a delivery to a flour mill ...
365px x 500px | 148.50kB
[source page]
post post post IMG style emoticons default blush gif IMG http www mtv com news photos v vma 07 table cameras ugc 44 jpg Paul the guitarist IMG
admin
hu, 12 Aug 2010 10:00:12 GM
News4u-News Desk-The . UGC. on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that it was essential for the central government to have sought its recommendations before embarking on de-recognising the 44 deemed universities in the country. ...
