The Facts of Life!

Web 2.0, AOL, A. I. M, Surfing the Web, User-Generated Content. What do these words or phrases have to do with each other? Each is a phrase that makes me and many of my peers cringe and ultimately lose control of our bowels (well not quite).

We will now refer to UGC as duh. Oh fine, I'll keep calling it User-Generated Content or at least UGC. ugh. As I eluded to, I find the concept of UGC to have a large amount of duh-factor attached. As it seems to me the only parts of information online that isn't UGC is that created by a robot. Even if a corporation posts information, they are still users, thus it's still UGC.

Is it too common sense to discuss UGC? Seems so to me. There doesn't seem to be many if any alternatives to UGC and given my definition, that is certainly true. But fine, take away my definition and consider only people like you and me who write blog posts, add reviews to yelp or any other similar site, and perhaps make videos to post online and we'll work from there. There are very few sites I can think of that I use on a somewhat regular basis that aren't UGC, maybe Google Maps, but if you look at the mini reviews there ya go, Google Maps has UGC too! It's everywhere!.. Infiltrating..!

From what I gathered from Bruceclay.com some websites or companies are struggling with whether they should add aspects of UGC to their sites for fear of "bad things" being said. Get over it is what I say. Don't you all remember the Facts of Life.. you take the good you take the bad, you take them both! Today's users don't want much to do with sites that can't be moderated to some degree by unbiased yet knowledgeable users. And it would've been so much longer before now if it weren't for people still using AOL! ... heh... no offense or anything.