This year YOU was the person of the year in Times Magazine because of the explosion of user generated content (UGC) online. It is an amazing time, when media is being transformed by participation of the every day person – citizen media, as Technorati calls it—leading to buzz words like democratization of content and the celebration of information exchange and sharing outside the chokehold of big media company editors.
I was noting a related trend however and I have been trying to put a name to it. The expression user generated content connotates objects: text, pictures, video. Look around, and you also see the proliferation of new forms of user generated….well, not content. In Reality All Starz users create experiences in the form of challenges and invite others to participate. Instructables allows people to create wizard-like lessons for each other. In Second Life, users are creating their own immersive 3D environments and games. In Votigo, people create contests. The most amazing of all, in Kiva.org, users are engaged in loan transactions with each other.
User generated experiences, user generated games, user generated procedures, user generated transactions. In essence, we see an increasing trend in not only user generated content but also user generated activity. In certain verticals, e.g. e-commerce, user generated transactions have exisited for a while in sites like e-bay and craiglist. These sites have removed the brick and mortar store as the mediating third party between seller and buyers. However sites with more complex social interactions, requiring not only interpersonal trust but also procedural assistance, are having a new hey day.
How is it possible? Because these sites provide procedural templates for social transactions, while leveraging the advantages new web 2.0 social technologies afford by embedding these transactions in a rich social context (e.g., social networks, reputation systems, social tagging). Here is the formula: take any common interaction between two people that’s usually mediated by an authoritiative third entity, study its core elements, develop an understanding of the predictors of a positive outcome, create an online template wizard for the experience, slap it over a social network, add some crowdsourcing intelligence, and voila!
The question remains, what common activities and transactions are still in the “chokehold” of authoritative entities such as specialized knowledge holders, bankers, and editors that could be freed by web 2.0 technology? A few come to mind: the real estate market, legal contracts, small claims court, insurance, education, astrology, psychology….the list goes on!
Just imagine it, an online small claims court where participants agree to abide by the rulings of their peers! Finally, taxpayers can stop paying for judges to resolve conflicts where most peers can mediate perfectly well.
