“User-Generated Content”

Frankly, my current search templates suck so badly that I can’t face searching The Daily Grind to see if (or how often) I’ve had this rant before: the term ‘User-Generated Content’ is plain rude. If the audience is building your site for you, the least you can do is come up with a more civil form of address than ‘user.’ I can’t begin to say how annoyed at get at all the TV people who insist on referring to UGC as if it’s the next big thing – not if they treat their customers with so little respect, it’s not. I’ve two concrete observations on the term, however:

  1. The way TV types talk about UGC reminds me very directly of the way they talked about video to 3G mobiles, five years ago. I don’t expect UGC, in the vague and woolly sense, to have any more impact than Sky News On Demand.
  2. Dive into Mark. Spot on.

(via Gruber, of course.)

[update, Wednesday: Boing Boing had a story a few days ago about a Nielsen Consumer Generated Media conference that barred attendees from… er… blogging about the conference.]

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