Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > March > 13 > Entry
Panel: User-Generated Content: State of the Union
Date/Time: 2 p.m. Friday
Panelists: Dean Mccall (Founder, IdeaGin), Stephen Newman (CEO, Mouth Watering Media), Todd Morrey (Mosso: The Rackspace Cloud), Wes Wilson (President, IncSpring), Chris Tolles (Moderator. CEO, Topix).
The gist: User-generated content can be a great thing — it can build community, spread news and help carry the load of content creation. But getting people to start generating content is a big challenge and dealing with those participants can be a pain and bring up lots of legal issues because, in the words of Tolles, “they suck.” Those users will figure out loopholes and that mob rule makes it a challenge to monetize user-generated content. When done right (Linked In, Threadless, IMDB), it can generate great two-way communication. Early in the panel, an applause war broke out between the adjacent Ballrooms B and C. I think Ballroom B (“My Boss Doesn’t Get It”) won.
Quotes: Instead of just taking user-generated content and making his company money, “We’re hoping that we can all get rich together” — Wilson “I heard Diddy talking on Ellen about Twitter and I thought the end times were nigh” — Tolles
Takeaways: Find ways to make good content (highly rated comments, for instance) rise to the top. Digg is a good example of a popular site that has found effective ways to create hierarchies of user content. Building a good moderator or karma system is not easy.
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