 This is Ralph Simon with another edition of Future Talks with futurist Glenn Himstra and Gerd Leonhardt, and today we're going to talk about the future of user-generated content. What's your view on UGC? User-generated content? Well, it's a huge, huge growth area. Nothing has changed the world. Well, that's an exaggeration. Not much has changed the world more than the blogs. I mean, it's just been astonishing to watch what's happened with the desire of so many people to say so much, who knew? And now with YouTube, we see it in the media visual world as well. I'm constantly astonished at the amount of time that people apparently have and the desire to put something out there to be seen or heard. Just how widespread is UGC? Well, I think we have to differentiate. They said there's two different things happening here. One is what I call truly user-generated content, which is a lot of blogs are. And other ones are really user-generated context, to some degree regurgitating what's already there and using stuff that somebody else has made or linking to it. What's called splogs, spam blogs in the blogging world. Splogs. Splogs. They ultimately suck off content and make a new one to place ads. This is the equivalent of spam and there's a lot of that happening. So the user-generated idea is to a large degree is mixed up in all different levels all the way from copying and blogging to linking to commenting and then creating really, truly original content. So there's all these shades are happening on the web. And what's happening right now is that I think that the drive of, for example, in the blogging business or in people sharing videos and stuff is essentially creating a bit of a first wave where anything goes. People put up stuff about how they're laughing in front of TV and put that up and they think that's funny, but only 34 people would ever watch it. So it's sort of like it's an early wave of experimentation. Ultimately, I think that what we're seeing is as in blogs, for example, about 75 percent of bloggers pretty quickly drop blogging because they realize it's actually a bit of work. It's not like you can just write because you can get a type pad or a blogger. So what type pad and blogger and WordPress and everybody else is doing is they're creating self-publishing tools. It's no longer just about typing and putting it up. It's self-publishing music, self-publishing media, self-publishing films. And so this whole thing is merging into a multimedia experience. Clearly Six Apart, which is one of the biggest blogging companies in the world, owns type pad and live journal and Vox. They launched Vox.com, which is a multimedia experience. You can put up any film, pretty much, any sort of music, and you can stream it to the world. So are you saying then that user-generated content is effectively the lubricant of social networks? To a large degree it is, and its sustainability, I think, is an interesting question, as Gerd was just raising. Is it one that five years from now we'll find that most people kind of got tired of it? Now maybe the new tools will be continually spectacular enough that there's a new wave and then a wave after that. But my guess is that there will be a certain percentage, and it might be a pretty significant percentage, and that would mean millions of people who find it continually interesting, potentially even, at least a little bit financially lucrative, because they can produce such quality because they want to devote so much time that we'll see a continual growth, but we'll see a lot of stuff fall back. But the social networks, which are another aspect of it, I mean everybody wants to fill up their social network with material and then people learn about this or that video or this or that blog through the social networks, and that's what sort of drives all the traffic, and that doesn't show any signs of abating to me. Can you think of any pertinent examples of user-generated content that has really exploded into them, into the mass? Well I think, again, we're really early, I think the most, the best examples here really are the blogs for the time being, because they have become their own, you know, and right now, I mean everybody who launches something new wishes to be covered by blogs. Yeah. I mean that is the hottest thing, right? All the PR agencies are like, oh, you know, I don't know about Business Week or so, we'll get those guys anyway. Let's go to techno-rock. We need these guys to cover us, you know? So I think the biggest difference in, you know, and some of these aspects is that for example, in television, television existed because, you know, I thought I was great and I put a show on television and then you can watch it and you can agree that I'm great, but it's not going to be your stuff on TV ever, right? Now it's the other way around. I publish stuff that I think is great and then everybody else can do the same and everybody else can sort of try to get to a TV-type position, right? They can be watched, they can express themselves and I think that itself has tremendous value to people doing it. It does not, however, mean that everything they do actually has the same value than what used to be professionally produced in the same way. It's a different layer, right? Just like blogging, you know, blogging is intensely personal and you have to take it for what it's worth. It's not objectively researched or most of it isn't. It's just one opinion. So I read the Wall Street Journal, I read Financial Times and I read the blogs and that together gives me the coverage I want. Now there's a story going around Hollywood at the moment that seeking out new talent, the new filmmakers, the best way that Hollywood is actually seeking out perhaps the next Steven Spielberg is to look at user-generated content on YouTube. Is this an example of what you're talking about, the widening influence and impact of UGC? Yeah, I think that's, I'm sure that's a good idea because it's amazing. You know, a lot of stuff, actually it's amazing when you look at a YouTube and you think, who would have thought to put that up and why would anybody go look out, then you do discover only 12 people have looked at it. Do you think it justifies the $1.65 billion of Google paid for it now? Yeah, I think so. Easily. Easily so because the desire to put stuff up, the desire to become visual, the net is going to become more and more visual. And in fact talent is going to emerge. I mean, we all know of young people ourselves who are creative types and there's nothing harder in the creative world than to get discovered. And if you've got a tool that at least gives you a shot at more and more people noticing and then that rumor leaks to somebody who is one of these talent scouts and they may wander across it but it's more likely that some social network will say, Judy saw this on YouTube, you ought to go take a look. And they go take a look and they say, you know, that's one cut above. Maybe we'll see if they did anything else and on the story goes and before you know it, they've been discovered. It's really just an enlargement of what we had before. You know, as a band before, you'd go pack up your stuff in a van and you'll play a gig everywhere you can. And somebody would maybe discover you, now you pack up your stuff and you put it on my space and maybe somebody will run across you and you still do the gigs. This is like the example of the married couple, long married. I think they were either Greek or Italian where the husband and the wife were both cooks and they would have the ripartee in their own kitchen and the husband would give the wife a pat on the butt as a kind of show of affection and this became a cult offering on YouTube. This is another form of user-generated content where you're basically creating your own mini-culture that then spreads into the mass. And I personally know a couple of people who have made it an ambition to become a television show and so what they've done is produce a little YouTube clip. I don't think that really one of them wants to be a cook. I have a cooking show, which of course are big deals. And it is an awfully good way to sort of do a demo tape and at least have a shot at a lot of people watching. I think this goes also with the discussion of what I call the people formerly known as the consumers. Which I borrow from the Prince definition of him formerly known as Prince. I think what we're seeing here is that a lot of consumers who used to be relegated to being like over there getting stuffed with content, they still do it for luxury. But now they're saying like, wait a minute, now I got a camera. Can I be like this guy? And of course probably they can't, but at least they can try it and they can experiment. And this is a great creative process for the average person. Even though you may ultimately sort of be full of shit of actually achieving the same status, you know, you still it's a process, right? So I think what happens is consumers and users are thinking of themselves differently now as being part of the control mechanism of by having value of the click, some people even argue that the user just by being there and by actually fishing and doing stuff, they become content. Because that essentially creates the momentum, right? I mean, those big social networks like Bebo or Facebook, there wouldn't be anything without the users. Just like eBay wouldn't be anything without buyers and sellers, right? So the users in eBay are the content, right? So eventually I think if you think this is down five or ten years down the road is an active user, no matter what they're doing in network is going to create a lot of value. So it's better to have the user than not to have a user pretty much under any circumstance. Yeah. Yeah. And it ties in to the idea of the sort of merging of let's call it real life or physical life and life on the network. Those things become more and more intertwined so that you're just kind of in both spaces at once and the idea of just your presence on the network being part of the content, the fact that at futurist.com, for example, the fact that people come from all over the world when we display that, that's part of the content of what we're displaying. Oh, look, we get people from Iran and we get people from various countries in Africa and so on. And you think, how would they ever find this little website here in the US? But they do. And in fact, it becomes a powerful content statement to say these visitors came from all over and they had no intention of being part of the content. I think what really undermines media and traditional media is in the definition of copyright and usage right, right? Again, because me as the regurgitator of this content, you know, the re-user, I mess with the system because I'm remixing it, I'm putting a video and synchronizing it with some music. And all of this being UGC. Yeah, all of this being qualified as a cool stuff you can do on the web. And now there's hundreds of websites of splashcasts and I, what's it called, IY or not IY, whatever, there's hundreds of them, including Kite and others. And a lot of all these things to happen, right? So who's to say if this is legal or not? And does a songwriter have a right to revoke permission of you using it as a soundtrack on YouTube? That's bringing up a myriad of issues. Bottom line is for the media owners participating in all of this and getting your hooks into this crowd site. That is the crucial, that's the next radio, right? That is the next way of getting your foot in the door, right? And so loosening up on the control mechanism here, which is sort of against the idea of guarding copyright, you know, that is the key. And that's the cardamom that the current content owners are facing, right? They're going to allow this and be part of it or they're going to keep on clutching on it and be part of it with other license. This is such an interesting discussion, interesting argument, the whole notion of user-generated content and the feeling by the consumer or the user that I've got to be me.