Henrik Werdelin

The last couple of years everyone has been talking about User Generated Content. This concept merged with the long tail theory has been promoted as everything from the democratization of content, over the new way to find talent to the savor/death of major media companies. However, while user generated content for use have filled up many video sites with tera bytes of data and admittedly have given us all many laughs, the amount of quality content that is produced is still relative low compared to the amount of users of the net. I think one of the reasons for this is to be found in what seems to be a common 2/8/90 participation model. Namely 2% of web users makes a blog (or other content), 8% of web users write a comment and 90% just read them. The promise of the User Generated Content is therefore focused on the 2%. However, I increasingly see sites that are pushing and working because a new concept that I refer to as BEHAVIOR GENERATED CONTENT.

Its content generated by people’s actions not by them actively creating anything.  Content generated by activity. A good example is Facebook who create 100 of hours of storytelling by allowing friends of friends to read what they have “done”. (newsfeed). Another one is Bungie.net from Microsoft has created 100x hours of content by creating interesting stats models from their game Halo. On these pages you can spent hours just seeing how many games a user have played, what the stats were and so on. Last.fm has a bit of this also.  I am pretty sure that we will see a whole host of new sites pop up that will generate content based on what people are doing instead of what they are creating.

(299 words, written in 14 minutes, in new York, on a mac, at 6.29pm, while listening to Fergie, average spelling mistages 5%… well u get the point)