Some Generated Content from a User

"User Generated Content" what is that? Some sort of risque XXX rated material? I had no idea what to think of this week's reading assignments except to be slightly excited. "Oooh, it's like Wikipedia and all those sites anyone can update...buzz kill". Still, user generated content is a very new and interesting topic. We're not sure how it is exactly it will affect us, but we know it already has.

I was a late bloomer in the wikipedia world. I'd heard peope talk about it, but we were never formally introduced until I came to college. In one class, two of my friends were talking about how they changed the definition of a word to be their friend's name. This lasted for about a nanosecond and a half before someone in Japan changed it back. But this made me think...can we really change the facts on the internet? Can a few people change the facts? Ever since then i've been wary of sites that allow changes, but after these readings i understand that they can be very useful to the website and the rest of us.

Even though some people have a problem with the exact term "User Generated Content" (get over it) I think it's a really interesting idea. Obviously Wikipedia and YouTube have been very sucessful in getting and maintaining users. Others, like Current TV are struggling to gain and keep viewers. The YouTube is. CurrentTV might be a simple fact that people don't like to watch certain clips and want the power to move on to the next one. Overall though, why do some user genertaed sites do much better than others? Your guess is as good as mine...for the time being, I might need to change that statement later on.