The Gong Show

The NYTimes has a summary piece on the rise of user-generated content in 2006. Jon Pareles, the author of the article, is guilty of generalizations and over-simplification of what I consider to be nuanced behavior, but one piece of the article really rang true for me. Jon discusses a problem that is intrinsic to the concept of user-generated content, the lack of filter for quality content:

IN [sic] the tsunami of self-expression, audiences have been forced to take on a much bigger job: sifting through the new stuff. For musicians, the Internet has become an incessant public audition. What once was winnowed down by A&R departments, and then culled again by radio stations and other media, is now online in all its hopeful profusion. A listener could spend the rest of her life listening to unreleased songs. Some people do just that to claim bragging rights, or blogging rights, for discovering the next indie sensation.

Jon hits the nail on the head here. Filtering the raw stream of user-generated content is both a significant problem and key attribute of this new form of content creation. For some (think: kids scouring the digg upcomming page for the next big story) filtering the raw stream is a badge of pride. For others (think: your parents trying to find “lazy sunday” on YouTube and getting lost among the clones) filtering the raw stream is off-putting and frustrating.

If user-generated content is more than a trend (which is debatable) and manages to thrive over the next few years, I think filtering the raw stream will lose its novelty and eventually become a significant usabilility problem. Going forward, we are going to see more automated and implicit means of filtering user-generated content. Without automation, the burden on the users to be the human filters will become overwhelming.

Automated and implicit filtering already exists today: take Interestingness for example. It is an algorithm on Flickr that looks at the metadata surrounding the user-generated content on the site and, as a result, can rank a list of images based on how interesting they are. I feel confident we will see more algorithms very similar to Interestingness on other sites powered by user-generated content. If my prediction is wrong, then I suspect user-generated content will be nothing more than a mid-2000s internet fad because the usefulness of this source of content will be crippled by the need to filter it.

Fun side note: Flickr patented interestingness. I don’t know what are the implications of the patent for other user-generated content sites, but it’s noteworthy nonetheless.

Update: Nick Carr’s commentary on this NYTimes piece is terrific.