They will not come
A while ago, and not only once, I wrote about my disappointment from those services that rely on “user generated content” in direct manner. I claimed than, I much more convinced now that “user generated content” is a great idea if it’s done without bothering the user.
Even good ideas, like Squidoo that is making interesting attempt to build credibility into search, are failing to attract and retain the masses because they require work, with very little obvious return. Moreover, observation on successful services – such as Google or Amazon, demonstrates that gathering information from the user has to be indirectly.
Michael Arrington’s criticism on Squidoo is touching this issue:
The best lenses are generating $30 or so a month for the lensmaster. A true expert on a topic could generate many, many times that number by creating a blog, along with some static content, and putting up simple Google adsense ads. So top content producers are not going to be heading to Squidoo for the money, ever (Squidoo’s model is set up in such a way that they could never make as much money from a lens as they could on their own). And besides, the blog format just works better for experts - fresh content generates lots of links, which equals traffic and search engine juice.
The only unanswered question is whether or not experts will go to Squidoo even without the financial incentive. Maybe, but Squidoo’s tools are not particularly advanced - self publishing is easy these days.
It seems like Michael understood, and is making a very interesting attempt to implement in his new company , the idea that content need to be gathered from the users without generating additional work for them. And this simple statement summarizes it pretty well:” [user will not come] because they don’t want to generate content, they want better life”
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†[user will not come] because they don’t want to generate content, they want better lifeâ€
I got that one from Scott Heiferman’s blog. He lists 50 of them, I picked the 10 that resonate the most (this one was no. 1).
I read it again just now and noticed that I got the link to Scott Heiferman’s blog from Seth Godin’s blog.
Full circle.
assaf
10 May 06 at 9:26 pm
It is really sad, If he only listen to what he was preaching all these years. Yet their is still allot to learn from him, even from Squidoo
Rogel
10 May 06 at 9:42 pm
†[user will not come] because they don’t want to generate content, they want better lifeâ€
I got that one from Scott Heiferman’s blog. He lists 50 of them, I picked the 10 that resonate the most (this one was no. 1).
I read it again just now and noticed that I got the link to Scott Heiferman’s blog from Seth Godin’s blog.
Full circle.
assaf
10 May 06 at 10:26 pm
It is really sad, If he only listen to what he was preaching all these years. Yet their is still allot to learn from him, even from Squidoo
Rogel
10 May 06 at 10:42 pm
[...] Is Squidoo inability to take off and reach the masses unique or maybe many of the so called web 2.0 companies need to re-examine their approach? Can it be that the concept behind many of these companies targets a small portion of the entire population? I guess I am, at list somewhat, one of those early adopters. I enjoy technology for the sake of technology. I enjoy using a web site that was design well. I even pack my hard drive with many applications that nobody really need. But even the most dedicated web 2.0 follower has to wonder who really need this company , or this . And when they coined the term software as a service , they meant to a real service not only a delivery method. So before dreaming about being punched by Yahoo! Listen to this advice : A good review in Techcrunch can get a company their first 5-25K beta users very quickly. However, I’d strongly caution entrepreneurs from taking their initial consumer adoption metrics and extrapolating them too far into the future. I believe startups will find it difficult to cross the “Techcrunch chasm” between the Web 2.0 geeks and Mainstreet USA. If we could get access to the usage logs of the top 10 Web 2.0 properties, I would bet that their 10,000 most active users would all be the same. 1000tags.com, i4giveu.com, Service, Software as a service, software development, Web 2.0 [...]
It looks obvious » Blog Archive » Where are the masses?
11 May 06 at 9:21 pm