Mike Butcher - mbites

Hi - great points. I don't think the issue is so much about whether social networks are killing UGC but whether our expectations of UGC were valid. Social networks work because they make it easy to talk to strangers who might like us. Yes, they're about sharing information and letting people know how clever we are in the same way we want our blogs to act, but mostly they're about gossip. That's why they're social networks not news networks. And I don't think you can say it's all UGC in anycase - so is texting in that model. I think it's fine for people to do whatever they want online (as long as I can avoid them doing it) but I also think we need to stop calling it UGC any time someone spots a story written by a paid journalist and uploads the link to Newsvine or whatever. I worry that what the web risks losing, with all the twittering and wall-scribbling, is UCC - user created content - that adds real value to it as a news media. The web has started to feel like sitting on train with everyone around me talking loudly on their mobile phones about what they did two days ago. When I started working on my own UCC/UGC (whatever) website, a bloke in Washington emailed me depressing figures from trials his company had run. He said people wanted to read news stories, lots wanted to recommend stories, but only the tiniest fraction wanted to actually write articles themselves. I think the problem with social networking is it feeds our natural laziness. We can pass on links or comments without a lot of effort and still feel we're part of something big and important.