Thursday, February 19, 2009

Unintentional user created content

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a dialog featuring Sun Microsystems' Johnathan Shwartz and a few other names (sorry too lazy to look it up).
In the dialog, one of the participants ask this question:

"Would you write a book for someone for free"

If you ask me, then my answer is no. Then come the next question.

"What about a paragraph... for free"

Well, probably,

"What about a word, just one word"

Sure.

Well, that is what Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo etc.) is doing. Google is asking all of us to write a "book". A few words a person.
This book contains the combined knowledge of all of us... well at least it contains to combined "intention" from all of us. My question is this,
are we aware that we are creating content for Google? Some of us do, most don't. This is waht I call "unintentional user created content"

Imagine now, if we have a video cam that will take movie of every aspect of our lives. Couple that video cam with a sound recorder and you can
express yourself whenever you feel like it. It will also capture your interaction with people around you. Couple that with a GPS receiver and
your location, your image, your interaction will automatically be your blog: an autoblog if you prefer.

No more messing around with computers and no more having to type things. All you have to do is ... welll ... nothing. Everything becomes a blog.
(Of course there are time when you want to shut off such device.) Now, of course all these are voluntary. Now before you dismiss this as some
fantasy I cooked up, just watch your next season American Idol. You'll see that people LOVE to put their live online. (And also, the hordes of
idiotic videos on youtube substantiate this also).

I do belive that unintentional user created content is the future. Today, we do have youtube and blogspots and twitter and whatnot, but these
"intentional" web 2.0 stuff are small fry compared to what is coming.