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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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.
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