Content-ment

Apparently Web 2.0 is all about "user-generated content". Now you can break that content down by media type: blogs, photostreams, videos, podcasts, etc.

There is, however, another distinction (although a somewhat hazy one) between creating content to specifically put on the web for others to view and just making available content that you have created for some other purpose. "Broadcasting" & "narrowingcasting" might terms you could use, but they don't seem to be quite right. Most narrowcasters aren't consciously casting anything. They are just sharing.

Photos are an example of this. Very few people take photos to specifically post on the web. We take photos because that's one of our primary ways of recording events. Compare istockphoto (with over a million photos for sale by professionals & hopefuls & 14,000 new images a week) and flickr (with what seems to be 378 million photos and 2,264 uploaded in the last minute). Some of those flickr folk might be aiming to earn cash but many just want their friends to see what they've been up to.

Blogs & podcasts are a bit different. Most of us are not in the habit of creating weekly radio shows about our lives or handing out photocopies of our personal journals.

Video is an interesting halfway house. The profusion of digital recording and editing technology and the tradition of the "home movie" make it more like photography. But these will be videos that most people will not want to watch (other people's home movies are boring).

In some ways this reminds me of my content-based knowledge management experiences. Asking people to create content specifically for a KM activity is very difficult. Asking them to make available what they already have is still hard but easier. The promise of modern content management systems is that files and documents are caught in context. But most of these will not be documents that other people will want to see - the business equivalents of other people's home movies.