User Generated Content

All of a sudden the little spoken of you turns out to be the person of the year!! So here I am trying to figure out what this might mean. I know they are talking about the fact that there are a lot of people out there generating content, but my question is: Is this content for real? I mean is this really "Great" Content.

Let me try put that question in context - Lets say Joe is a new to blogging. Joe's Blogging story might go something like this:

Day 1 - Joe is excited. He always wanted to have a web page of his own but when he had tried to set it up he found he had to know about things like html, web pages, layouts and the likes. All of a sudden Joe figures he can get out there and pay more attention to what he wants to say instead of how to get it out there.

Day 2,3,4,5 - Joe decides to start a blog the very next day.

Day 6 - Joe gets onto a popular blogging site and starts a blog. He chooses a template that's just perfect for him, goes on to place things just where he wants them and then writes and publishes his first blog.

Day 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 ... - He checks his blog to see how neat it looks

Day 7, 8, 9 - He keeps posting to his blog.

Day 10 - He discovers that he has so far not got any comments from anyone. He updates his blog, but wonders why.

Day 11 - Now Joe is irritated. He is actually taking time off to post his ideas out there and no one is reading!!! Joe now ties to add pictures to his blog.

Day 12 - Joe decides to find ways to get people to his blog and so searches here and reads this, this and this. He discovers that the only real way to get more people to your blog is by "participating" in related blogs. So Joe goes to a blog search, searches for related blogs and posts about 25 comments across various related blogs.

Day 13 - Joe finds a comment on his blog!! He repeats his commenting strategy.


My point?
Joe now becomes one of the millions of active bloggers across the Internet - That's a good thing.
But Joe's driving force is not "sharing of knowledge" or any such noble purpose, but simply to get people to his Blog - Is that a good thing?


This phenomenon is not something that is only blog related, interestingly the same kind of thing seems to happen on Digg. In fact this seems to be so common on Digg that it has its own name: Digg Circle. In fact the question of all this being allowed became such a big issue that Kevin Rose the founder of Digg had to step in resulting in the resignation of one of Diggs ( at that time ) top users.


I am not saying that participation for reasons other than "wanting to share knowledge" is bad. I just think that the resultant materiel might suffer...