Me and
Michael are currently compiling a list of popular politically relevant UGC forms as part of our explication
project.
Here are some we’ve ID’d so far:
Personal blog, the first political UGC type, is often maintained by individuals for a variety of purposes, from influencing others’ opinions to making money to creative expression (
Davis, 2009;
Pew, 2006). Some of the defining structural features of this UGC form is a reverse-chronological ordering of the date-stamped posts on the blog page, archiving of the older posts, and use of permalinks, all leading to emphasis on recency in blog posts and which enable cross-blog “dialogue” centered around specific blog posts (
Hindman, 2009;
OECD Report, 2007;
O'Reilly, 2005). Currently, 10% of American Internet users read blogs on a typical day (
Pew, 2009).
Chat room, the second UGC type, allows individuals to exchange most often textual information in a relatively interactive or synchronous manner (
Cornwell & Lundgren, 2001). These can have one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one formats. Often, chat format encourages shorter messages and is carried out anonymously (
Subrahmanyam, et al., 2004).
Pew (2009) found that 5% of American Internet users “chat in a chat room or in an online discussion” on a typical day.
Discussion board/forum represents the third type of UGC. Such boards/forums are available to users through listing services where they are organized by topic (e.g., directory.big-boards.com; allchatsites.com). Boards are organized in a tree-like structure where the first level includes broad main sections (e.g., new members, FAQ, politics and news, marketplace, etc.), which consist of threads that can be started and replied to by the board participants. Many boards allow inclusion of multimedia into the posts, and allow for interaction among individual board members via private (instant messenger or email) or public (forum post replies or blog comments) channels. These forums can be moderated or unmoderated (
Himelboim et al., 2009;
Wright & Street, 2007).
Content-sharing site represents the fourth UGC type, encompassing various hugely popular sites, such as YouTube or Flickr. These sites contain a vast diversity of textual and multimedia content that users themselves submit, and often rate and organize to make it easily searchable. The ease of uploading content, numerous content search options, ease of content rating, and vast databases are some of the technological features making this UGC type attractive to users.
Pew (2009) reported that 16% of online Americans use video-sharing sites and 5% upload photos to photo-sharing sites on a typical day.
Socially aggregated tagging site (a.k.a., folksonomy) represents the fifth UGC type. This UGC form allows mass audience to tag submitted content, creating layman’s taxonomy of this content based on the tags created by the users. The users do not necessarily generate the content, but instead they tag or classify the content, adding value to it by adding structure and making it better searchable. Folksonomies are sometimes incorporated into blogs, content-sharing and social network sites, as is the case with Flickr, Facebook, and Blogger-hosted blogs (although, they do not have to be incorporated, as is the case with ReddIt). Seven percent of American Internet users tag or categorize online content, such as photos, blog posts, and news stories on a typical day (
Pew, 2009).
Social-network site is the next and the most popular type of UGC, allowing individuals to create personal web pages of varying degrees of publicness (
boyd & Ellison, 2007) and, more importantly, connect these pages with others into an interrelated and clearly articulated network of online social relationships (
OECD Report, 2007). MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook, ranked by Alexa.com in top 10 most popular website worldwide, are the best known representatives of this group. These sites are characterized by a variety of mechanisms to share information with one’s social network, and often incorporate blogs, IM, status updates, running tally of comments on the individual’s profile page, ability to share and tag various content, etc. The sites help individuals to maintain their existing networks of off-line relationships online, as well as develop new online-only networks of “friends” (
boyd & Ellison, 2007).
Pew (2009) reported that 19% of online Americans use this UGC type on a typical day.
Wiki is another type of UGC, representing a form of convenient collaborative authoring where a single coherent document is being edited by a large number of individuals who often have no interaction with one another other than their current collaborative work. Wikipedia (ranked as 7th most popular site worldwide by Alexa) is the most popular representative of this UGC group. Technologically, this UGC form is characterized by users’ ability to publish content, rather than simply discuss it with one another. Indeed, individuals are given substantial degree of control over the content, and can create any encyclopedia entry, or edit any existing entry (
Bruns, 2009;
OECD Report, 2007). Additionally, Wikipedia incorporates a variety of other UGC forms, such as discussion forum, where users can discuss the encyclopedia’s entries or rules of encyclopedia’s operation.
Pew (2009) reports that 12% of online Americans use Wikipedia alone, which means that the percentage of users for other types of wikis (e.g., WikiMapia) might be much higher.
Participatory journalism site is the ninth UGC form. In their discussion of journalism transformation,
Deuze et al. (2007), describe “participatory journalism” by emphasizing its 3 core elements:
(1) content shaped by both traditional producers and traditional consumers of the content;
(2) a degree of decentralization of the collaborative effort to shape content;
(3) balancing of editorial control by professional journalists with content creation efforts by the audiences.
It can be argued that every single journalistic organization today falls into this category if it offers contact information that can be used by the audience members to supply story ideas. We acknowledge this observation and agree that the difference today is in the degree of participation, and not in whether an organization is participatory or not. A variety of news outlets allow users to submit content (video, pictures, audio), offer story ideas, provide a space for users to publish their blogs and space to publish stories, enable users to tag, rate, vote on, and organize stories on the organization’s site, allow users to comment on the journalists’ stories, create discussion forums and chat rooms in context of the news organization’s site, allow users to build public profile and establish a network or connections with other users, etc. (
Domingo et al., 2008;
Chung, 2008).
Anything important missing from the list?? Let us know by leaving a comment.
