“The game changer,” according to John Rendon, president of the Rendon Group, a global strategic communications consultancy, “is user-created content.”  This phenomenon is the most transformative innovation in communications since the invention of radio.  From the perspective of most existing businesses, the Internet provides new channels for marketing their products, but at least to this point it has not fundamentally changed the way in which they operate.
 
     As the initial discussion of the Internet and its impacts made increasingly clear, however, the Net is in some fundamental way different from previous media. Whereas virtually all existing mass media have concentrated control in the hands of a relatively small group of professional producers who are skilled in informing or entertaining vast audiences, the Internet has put the means of production in the hands of virtually every user. Anyone with access to the Internet who is willing to conform to a few simple, open protocols (e.g., TCP/IP) can create and publish content that in theory is available to anyone else who is connected to the Internet.

     As a result of this decentralized architecture, the Internet breaks down the distinction between producers and consumers. Moreover, because of the continuously declining cost of almost all things digital, the cost of acquiring the tools needed to produce content on the Internet has become so low that millions of individuals can afford it. 

     As Yale Law School professor Yochai Benkler put it, the Internet is not merely a medium (that is, a channel for distributing content) but a platform that enables millions of individuals to become content producers as well as consumers. Unlike other media, no one owns the Internet, and no one controls it.  A “platform,” according to Benkler, is “a technical and organizational context in which a community can interact to achieve a specific purpose.” In fact, some of the Internet’s most successful enterprises have succeeded by developing and distributing Internet-based platforms that allow individuals to create their own content. Among the Internet’s most distinctive successes are resources that enabled groups of people to work together collaboratively and voluntarily in surprisingly effective ways.
 

Wikipedia

     One of the best examples of how powerful and disruptive an Internet platform can be is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that Benkler describes as “one of the most successful collaborative enterprises that has developed in the first five years of the 21st century.”⁶  Wikipedia depends on “wiki” technology—a software tool that allows groups of people to work together to create and edit documents:

This platform enables anyone, including anonymous passersby, to edit almost any page in the entire project. It stores all versions, makes changes easily visible, and enables anyone to revert a document to any prior version as well as to add changes, small and large. All contributions and changes are rendered transparent by the software and database.⁷ 

     The wiki concept initially was conceived as a means to facilitate collaboration among small work groups.  The first wiki software was developed in 1994 by a computer scientist who wanted to create a convenient way for programmers to share techniques.  In 2001, however, Jimmy Wales decided to use this tool for a broader, more ambitious purpose: to allow a group of strangers with no institutional connections to work together to create a true encyclopedia. In addition to making the software tool widely available online, Wales established a relatively small number of rules for contributors, including encouraging authors to strive toward an objective, factual style (rather than expressing a personal point of view).  Perhaps most important, he developed a framework that makes updating, expanding, and correcting entries easy.

     Wikipedia grew slowly at first but then began to expand rapidly.  In its first year of operation, it attracted fewer than 500 contributors, who completed about 19,000 entries.  By June 2005, however, nearly 50,000 contributors had written more than 1.6 million articles.  Moreover, although Wikipedia is based in the United States, it has become a truly global phenomenon: Whereas 84 percent of all articles contributed in the first year were in English, by the middle of 2005 less than 40 percent were in English.

     Wikipedia has proved to be highly popular. In July 2006 Wikipedia attracted 29.2 million visitors, which made it one of the 20 most-visited websites and one of the 10 fastest-growing sites on the Web.⁸    Despite its success, Wikipedia has remained resolutely noncommercial.  No one is paid to contribute content, and no one is charged to use it. None of the material is copyrighted.  The site is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation and is supported primarily by user donations.  The foundation had a 2005 operating budget of $739,200.

     Critics have questioned the reliability of a product that is created by an amorphous group of anonymous nonprofessionals. Yet one of the strengths of Wikipedia is its ability to correct errors after they are identified.  Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, principal of The Albright Group, noted at a previous Aspen conference that she had found inaccuracies in the Wikipedia entry about herself, and she was able to correct it on the spot. 

     Wikipedia can be disarmingly honest about its own shortcomings.  In some cases, Wikipedia’s editors take the initiative in pointing out that some of its entries are works in progress that may need additional work.  For example, some entries carry notices addressed to users and contributors that say things such as, “This article or section may be confusing or unclear for some readers, and should be edited to rectify this.  Please improve the article, or discuss the issue on the talk page.”

     In fact, Wikipedia has done quite well in terms of accuracy, compared with more traditional publications.  An article published in the journal Nature in December 2005 compared 42 articles on scientific topics in Wikipedia with entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica and concluded that there was not much difference with regard to the accuracy of the articles.⁹   Yet Wikipedia’s timeliness, comprehensiveness, and editorial transparency are qualities that traditional publications cannot easily match.  As Jordan Greenhall noted, Wikipedia “lays all of its cards on the table” and lets its users take responsibility for deciding what they believe and don’t believe. 

Second Life

     In the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, an unemployed pizza deliveryman is a hero in the Metaverse, an alternate world that exists only in cyberspace.  While the deliveryman’s daily life in the real world is mundane and dreary, his adventures in the virtual world of the Metaverse are the stuff of high drama.   

     In fact, virtual online worlds have been part of the Internet since its early days (see sidebar, “MUDS, MOOs, and WorldsAway”).  When an avatar from Linden Lab’s Second Life appeared on the cover of Business Week in March 2006, however, it signaled that virtual worlds had come of age. Second Life, introduced in 2003, is a complex, three-dimensional world populated by highly detailed avatars. According to Linden Lab’s chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka, however, the secret of Second Life’s success is not its graphic richness but its commitment to providing users with the ability to create and control much of the content of Second Life.  Fully 70 percent of Second Life’s participants are also content creators.¹⁰

     Unlike Wikipedia, Second Life is a for-profit business. Linden Lab makes money by selling virtual “land” in its virtual world to “residents.”  The company charges users a monthly fee to control a certain amount of land, and it provides tools that allow them to build all sorts of structures on that land.  Users also have the ability to create an almost unlimited variety of other virtual objects—clothing, jewelry, art works—which they own and can buy and sell, using Linden dollars ($L), Second Life’s virtual currency. (Subscribers receive a certain amount of Linden dollars based on their usage; they can amass more money through their online transactions.) 

     Second Life has developed a vibrant economy that is based on hundreds of thousands of monthly transactions among its users.  Linden dollars also are convertible into U.S. dollars on a public exchange (see Figure 2). The Second Life avatar featured on the cover of Business Week, Anshe Chung (in real life, a Chinese-born language instructor living in Germany), operates a virtual real estate development business inside Second Life that has 10 full-time employees in Wuhan, China.  Another participant, Australian Nathan Keir, created a game in Second Life called Tringo that proved to be so popular that he has licensed it to a game publisher that plans to release a version for video game players.¹²  However, much of Second Life’s user-created content is given away, not sold.  According to Linden Lab’s Cory Ondrejka, approximately 40 percent of all content in Second Life can be copied freely.

     As Second Life has grown, it has attracted the attention of many real-world companies and institutions.  Among the corporations that are experimenting with promoting their brands inside Second Life are Adidas/Reebok, MTV, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Starwood Hotels, Toyota, and Wells Fargo.  Clothing manufacturer American Apparel has set up a store in Second Life, where it sells virtual clothes.  Nissan has launched a promotion that allows avatars to drive virtual cars in the virtual world.¹³   IBM purchased 10 islands in Second Life to provide a new means for its globally distributed workforce to meet and share ideas. IBM also reached agreements with Sears and Circuit City to build virtual stores for them in Second Life.  In a move that demonstrates that traditional media have taken notice of this trend, Reuters established a news bureau inside Second Life and assigned a full-time reporter to cover events in Second Life.¹⁴

craigslist

     Somewhere between the nonprofit Wikipedia and the for-profit Second Life is the nominally commercial craigslist, which is defined by Wikipedia as “a centralized network of online urban communities, featuring free classified advertisements (with jobs, housing, personals, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, and resumes categories) and forums sorted by various topics.” 

     The site originally was established in San Francisco in 1995 by Craig Newmark, who set it up to provide a convenient way for friends to let others know when and where parties and other interesting events were being held. The site is now the most popular resource in the San Francisco Bay area for finding housing or jobs and for buying and selling all sorts of goods.  The power of craigslist comes from its highly efficient organization and the ability of a user to search the site’s extensive listings to find just what he or she is looking for. 

     As of mid-2006, craigslist had expanded from San Francisco (which is still the most active location) to more than 300 cities worldwide. It attracts more than 15 million visitors each month and generates more than five billion page views, and it undoubtedly is responsible for generating millions of dollars in commerce among its users. However, craigslist has successfully resisted all temptations to become slicker or more commercial. With its slightly funky, lowercase-text-only home page, the site remains visually simple and unadorned. The entire global enterprise is operated with a staff of slightly more than 20 people who work out of an old house in a largely residential San Francisco neighborhood. The company’s only revenue comes from charges for help-wanted job ads in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City and apartment listings in New York City.

     In addition to paying the company’s operating expenses, revenues go to a private foundation that supports emerging nonprofit organizations.  Although Newmark remains actively engaged in the operation of craigslist, in 2000 he hired a CEO to run the company.  Newmark’s current title is “founder and customer service representative,” which accurately describes the role he plays in maintaining the site on a daily basis.  His abiding concern is not simply to see that the site operates smoothly but to ensure that it stays true to the spirit of community that it was originally designed to serve. In this sense, Newmark is spiritually closer to Dorothy Day of Hull House than to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com or Bill Gates of Microsoft. 

     Ironically, as modest and minimally commercial as craigslist may be, it probably poses the greatest economic threat to traditional newspapers because it competes directly with newspapers’ classified ad business.  An August 2006 article in The Economist titled “Who Killed the Newspaper?” quotes Rupert Murdoch as describing classified ads as the newspaper industry’s “rivers of gold.”  Murdoch also notes, however, that “sometimes rivers dry up.”¹⁵   Just as Wikipedia has been able to largely match the quality of existing encyclopedias and add additional capabilities while giving its content away, craigslist and other Internet sites have provided a better and cheaper alternative to newspapers’ classified ads.¹⁶   

Enter the Blogs

     The most extreme manifestation of the desire of Internet users to be producers of their own content instead of (or as well as) consumers of content may be the burgeoning world of blogs. According to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 12 million Americans—or roughly 4 percent of the entire U.S. population—now maintain a blog.¹⁷    Blogs appear to be even more popular in Japan than in this country: According to Peter Hirshberg of Technorati, 41 percent of all blogs are in Japanese, compared to 26 percent in English. 

     Hirshberg acknowledged that he was initially skeptical that “stuff created by ordinary people could be any good.”  He now believes that content that is being produced “by the audience talking to itself” is beginning to surpass traditional media in some areas.  For example, he asserted that better information about parenting is now available from online “mommy sites” than from traditional magazines.

     Because blogs are so easy to create and the cost of publishing a blog is so low, the Internet clearly has made a broader range of content available.  Many blogs are simply vehicles for the expression of individual opinion. In some cases, people with specialized knowledge or specific passions—professional or personal—blog about the things that interest them.  Whether this content is interesting to others depends, in part, on whether the bloggers are knowledgeable and articulate, as well as the degree to which others happen to share a blogger’s interests or passions.

     According to the Pew survey, about one-third of bloggers consider themselves to be engaged in a form of journalism. To blogging’s most ardent supporters, this rapidly growing army of “citizen journalists” is posing a direct challenge to the gatekeepers of traditional news media.  The positive contribution of blogs has been demonstrated most clearly during sudden disasters such as the December 2005 Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the July 2005 London subway bombing: Ordinary individuals have been able to report on what they have seen and experienced more quickly and directly than reporters from traditional media have.

     To critics, the actual journalistic accomplishments of bloggers have yet to live up to the ambitious claims for their importance.  In a critique of citizen journalists in The New Yorker tellingly titled “Amateur Hour,” Nicholas Lehman argues:

Even at its best and most ambitious, citizen journalism reads like a decent Op-Ed page, and not one that offers daring, brilliant, forbidden opinions that would otherwise be unavailable. Most citizen journalism reaches very small and specialized audiences and is proudly minor in its concerns.¹⁸    

     Daniel Schorr, the veteran reporter and senior news analyst on National Public Radio (NPR), admitted that he found himself “alternately fascinated and appalled” by the new media that are challenging many of the principles of professional journalism he was trained to hold dear.  Joseph Nye, distinguished service professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said that he was willing to grant that user-generated content that proliferates on the Internet is well suited to “harness the wisdom of the crowds.”  In a world of “too much content,” however, Nye said that he believes traditional media are still needed to provide reliable expert opinion.  Kwaku Sakyi-Addo, a Ghana-based broadcaster for the BBC World Service, added that as a journalist he is interested in the views of experts, but he also wants to be able to hear “the voice of the people.”  Neither can be substituted for the other. 

     As content on the Internet continues to proliferate, users are becoming more discriminating about what online information they are willing to trust. The USC Internet survey found that although many users are willing to trust online information posted by established media or the government, they are more skeptical about information posted by individuals. In 2005, 78.5 percent of users said that they trust that information on the Web sites of established media (such as nytimes.com or cnn.com) is reliable and accurate, whereas just 11.5 percent trusted information posted by individuals to be reliable and accurate.  

New Options for Adding Value

     In this rich but anarchic environment, an important challenge for old and new media alike is to help users navigate through the immense sea of online content to find information that is reliable and of interest to them. Arthur Sulzberger of The New York Times explained that one of the roles that his newspaper is taking on is to “edit the Web”—or, perhaps more accurately, to “curate the Web” for its readers. The newspaper’s Web site will carry blogs by its own staff and provide a listing of top blogs on a given topic. 

The mission of Technorati, according to Peter Hirshberg, also is to provide “meta-torial” content that helps users access and make use of the immense body of content being created by bloggers. Technorati does this not just by providing search capabilities but also by aggregating online discussions in a way that makes them useful and understandable.  The site’s home page has been redesigned to make it look more like a newspaper, organizing content from the “blogosphere” by categories and providing a convenient overview of the most popular topics currently being discussed by bloggers. 

New Metrics

     In this new world of wikis and blogs, new metrics may be needed to establish credibility and trust.  Lance Conn, executive vice president of Vulcan, Inc., pointed out that we are still in the early days of this new way to communicate and therefore are still ironing out many of the kinks in the process.  One of the key challenges is to develop new mechanisms for establishing trust.  For many people, the fallback is to rely on established brands.  In this new world, the challenge to these brands is to be sufficiently transparent about how they operate.

     For example, although what bloggers do may be related to journalism, blogging also has some unique characteristics.  According to Shel Israel, a prominent blogger and co-author (with Robert Scoble) of Naked Conversations, what bloggers are doing is not simply expressing their own views but participating in an “ongoing conversation” within the blogosphere. In practical terms, effective bloggers pay attention to and respond to what other bloggers are saying.  From this perspective, blogging is a form of what Israel calls social media.  David Carr, writing in The New York Times, expresses the difference between traditional media and blogs even more succinctly:  “Blogs, which may look like one more way to publish, are first and foremost a way to listen.”¹⁹

     Digg, which describes itself as a “user-driven social content website,” is another approach to helping users to find worthwhile information online. The site provides users with an easy way to identify online content they like and believe would be of interest to others.  This content then is listed on the Digg Web site, where other members of the “Digg community” can vote for it.  Stories that get the highest number of votes are displayed most prominently on the site.  What is popular on Digg is not always particularly momentous or even serious. The top-ranked stories tend to be about either celebrities in the news or obscure but interesting aspects of technology. 

     Digg’s ranking system has generated some controversy. When one blogger analyzed the top entries on Digg, he concluded that small groups of members may be manipulating the system to generate artificially high rankings for certain stories.²⁰   Whether this problem is simply an example of growing pains for a new system or a fatal flaw remains to be seen.

     Tracy Westen, CEO of the Center for Governmental Studies, suggested that the nature of creativity itself—or at least the way we understand creativity—may be changing.  We are most familiar with the sort of individual creativity of artists and others that typically requires some degree of isolation.  There also may be a kind of “social creativity,” however, that is being fostered by the collaborative tools provided by the Internet.  Similarly, academics and other intellectuals typically are committed to analytic processes that may take years to reach fruition.  In the online world, however, there is a pressure for instant analysis and conclusions that can be boiled down to a concise soundbite.  It may be too soon to know whether these new possibilities add to the useful sum of knowledge and lead to a more enlightened society.  In the meantime, Westen concluded, “we are experimenting with ourselves.”

     NPR’s Daniel Schorr suggested, not entirely facetiously, that the emergence of the new user-centered media may be something like Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite—an innovation that is capable of being used for constructive purposes (such as mining and road building) but also has considerable potential for mayhem and destruction.  Schorr concluded that we need to pay attention to the “social threats as well as the social potential” of the new media.

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