User-Generated Content

OK, so back to my trend list.

1. User-Generated Content. I had coffee with Ron Bloom over at Podshow close to a year ago. I worked for Ron and Adam Curry (MTV VJ now calls himself "The Podfather") when they ran Think New Ideas in the late 90s. Ron says to me "In five years, the majority of entertainment is going to be user-generated." We were having a conversation about podcasting at the time, but with the rise of YouTube, MySpace, Yadda, Yadda and Yadda, it's looking like maybe he wasn't too far off.

Now user-generated content means a lot of things, but basically it's all about harnessing the power of the collective consiousness of the web. That covers a lot of territory:
- online communities
- video/music/photo/review sharing sites (from Amazon to PornoTube)
- the notion of "tagging" (where users rate and/or rank content)
- blogs, podcasts, mobile blogs, rss feeds
- brands getting their customers to submit content (Converse did this two years ago by asking people to create TV spots and then actually running some of them. The entire Coke website is now all about content submitted by users).
- Google AdSense (uses an algorith based on user behavior to determine placement of ads)
I'm sure I'm missing dozens, but you get the point.

Stay tuned....