I have been interested in the ideas of User Generated Content recently. Yes, I know it’s a concept that’s been around for a while and it’s being more and more formalized with the Web2.0 “thing.” But, let me try and draw some concepts out of it. Let me know what you think.

There is a scale of user generated content, and where your service is on the scale means different things. Here’s how I think of it.

Contributed content type.On one end of the scale is metadata on the other end is original content.

Metadata is about the categorization and ranking of data. Services like Digg, or StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us. The content is not generated by the community. The community provides metadata around the content such as ranking and categorization. The content being ultimately consumed is not generated by the community, the final consumed content is external to the community. 

On the other side is original content. This includes blogging in all its forms and services like Flickr, YouTube, Craigslist, and Wikipedia. Original content is where the target consumption is generated by the community. Often times, such as the case of YouTube, the community generated content also includes user generated metadata.

Dynamic nature of the content. Content generated by a community can be very dynamic or very static.

Static contentis characterized by content that is generated once and never changed. This includes most type of content that is generated by communities. Ranking systems, photo sharing, and video sharing. The target consumed content is very static, only the metadata is dynamic.

Dynamic contentis characterized by content that is in continual flux. A wiki such as Wikipedia is a great example, where the target consumed data is always changing through community modification. It can change slow or fast, but the target content changes. Potentially, some social networks can fit into this category as the target content to be consumed is a user profile and people are continually updating their profiles with new information and messages.

Governance of content and community.There are two sides to governance and control of a community. On one side is totalitarian, with a strong centralized administrative group. On the other side is community governance.

The overall trend is moving towards community governance. With user reporting systems and the ability to change content at the forefront of many new web applications. There is still a central administrator to most user contributed content web communities and that may never change. Craigslist is a great example of community governance. Even MySpace with the ability to report a message as Spam utilizes community governance.

Direction of communication.It is often said that Web1.0 is a one way conversation and Web2.0 is a two way conversation. User generated content follows a similar concept. With user generated content the conversation is characterized in two ways: One to many or many to many.

With user generated content the community is both the source and the consumer. Either it’s one user providing content to the community or it is a collection of users generating the content for the community. Static content is one to many, dynamic content is many to many.

The world of user generated content is exciting. It decentralizes the generation of content and provides inherent mechanisms for editing and governance. It empowers users to direct their own experiences. It can be the ultimate in democracy of content.

Maybe you’ve heard the analogy of somone with their hair on fire as an image used to demonstrate the idea that when developing a business offering you should find a critical problem and figure out how to solve it. If you haven’t heard the analogy it goes something like this:

If someone’s hair is on fire they’ll want a hose, they’ll pay you anything you want for it and it the details about the hose doesn’t matter. If you can put the fire out, the person will not care about the color, size, shape or other details about the hose. When starting a business, developing a product, or brainstorming an offering look for a problem that people have and solve it for them. Fix a critical problem and the consumer will not care about the details of the solution.

Great advice, right? I think so. But I think there are a couple elements missing from the picture. I think the hair on fire analogy needs expanding on. Here are a few things to consider:

1. As stated, find a critical problem and provide a solution for it.
2. As illustrated in the image, but not usually considered; the customer has to know about the problem. This fits the hair on fire analogy. If the user’s hair is on fire, they’ll know. Solving problems that nobody perceives as a problem means you have to spend time and money to educate the consumer. And, if the consumer doesn’t know they have a problem, they will not seek you out. You have to find them.
3. This one is not illustrated in the picture. There have to be enough people with hair on fire. Or, the small number of customers with their hair on fire must pay big. Make sure your market is large enough to sustain.

So, I think the new analogy should be to find lots of people with their hair on fire and sell hoses to them. That would cover the three points above.

There are other considerations, but I think those three weed out a lot of non-starter business ideas. Cost structures, risk, competition, etc are considerations. But, if you find an idea that meets the three requirements that I’ve outlined, I think you’ve got a great idea to start with… and if you need help with any of the execution, give me a call or send mean email.