Legal Research

User generated content is on the way out?

By Jason

March 6th Newsweek put out a story called Revenge of the Experts. The gist of the article is that the current trend of user-generated content is on the way out in favor of a renewed interest in expert-vetted content.

Although there’s been some debate on this (see the comments on the post at the Lost Remote blog), I strongly disagree with the Newsweek article.

My own problem with the article is that it perpetuates an old concept that expertise must be arbitrarily decided on by media outlets, and those are the only experts who matter. In this case I use the term media outlet loosely to refer to any organization that produces content. The article cites a few expert-generated content providers (About.com, Mahalo, and BigThink) who are doing some interesting things. But the days when a publication like Newsweek, or websites like these could force an expert on it’s readers without question are over.

The internet has its own way of deciding who is and is not an expert, and mainstream media is going to have to deal with that.

Thanks to LibraryStuff for the heads up.

Full post as published by Jason the Content Librarian on March 13, 2008 (boomark / email).