MocoNews has an interesting post about an Australian company named Amethon that’s come up with a system to let carriers track user-created content. Basically users can register content they create by sending it to a special short code where it gets tagged, then can pass it on to their friends. Carriers can then keep track of how many times it gets forwarded, presumably building in some sort of reward system where people that create compelling content get rewarded if it gets passed around.
User-created content is a bug buzzterm for the mobile industry, but is the value in the content itself or giving people access to the tools to create it? For instance, the vast majority of personal blogs don’t get a very high readership, but peoples’ enthusiasm in creating them isn’t based upon that. Take Nokia Lifeblog, for instance — its value is as a tool, not that it makes your content popular or that it delivers some kind of reward to the user.
People don’t necessarily create content because they want it to be popular. In fact, quite a lot of people go on creating content knowing it’s not popular. But maybe Amethon is hoping this will be the mobile version of Google AdWords — the (often wrong) idea that anybody can throw AdWords up on their site, regardless of the content, and rake in the cash certainly delivers a lot of impressions for Google to sell, and perhaps the company is taking a similar angle.
the key to tapping into the user-created content stream is to help users create and share content. as you said, it’s not the content itself that is important nor that folks want to get famous or have a large distribution. the key is that folks want to share one-to-few, the content as the excuse for the conversation, and we should provide the tools for them to carry on that conversation. that is what services like typepad offer that products like movabletype or services like geocities could not provide.
you know what i mean?
tchau,
charlie
MobHappy: Encouraging User-Created Content
The key to tapping into the user-created content stream is to help users create and share content. It’s not the content itself that is important nor that folks want to get famous or have a large distribution. The key is
MobHappy: Encouraging User-Created Content
The key to tapping into the user-created content stream is to help users create and share content. It’s not the content itself that is important nor that folks want to get famous or have a large distribution. The key is