NETTING IT OUT

Since the early days of the Web, there have been dramatic changes in how information is created and disseminated via the Internet. The evolution began with users primarily consuming content—content created by corporations, media outlets, and other organizations with content professionals—and moved to a phase in which users have taken on a vital role as creators and publishers of their own content.

While we remain voracious consumers of Web content, and while we are daily becoming more prolific as content creators and publishers, demand for more control of our own creations is moving us to a third phase: users as content managers.

We all want reasonable control over what we create. This includes managing how it looks, who can access it, how it’s accessed, and what others can do with it. That’s what meaningful control is about.

This report discusses the increasing expectations users have for managing their own stuff, and the implications it has for the sponsors and business owners of online communities. We provide examples of sites that offer some degree of member “self-control”of their content, as well as recommendations for enabling your customers and community members to have the control they want over their creations.

MANAGING MEMBER-GENERATED CONTENT

Member-generated content is a vital and inseparable part of online communities; you can’t have one without the other. However, such content doesn’t appear magically. It’s created by users, either on the community site or elsewhere, and published within the community via the community platform.

It’s in the best interest of community sponsors and community members for it to be easy and satisfying for members to create and share content. Whether it’s easy or not depends on the platform’s capabilities, processes, and interface. But whether it’s satisfying or not depends on the user’s success in accomplishing what he wants to do. And this includes, in no small part, having control over what he creates.

Having true control over one’s own content means being able to do the following:

• Manage what’s published

• Manage how it looks

• Manage who can access it

• Manage how it’s accessed

• Manage what can be done with it

The Evolution of Users as Content Managers

Users’desire to manage their own content didn’t spring up overnight. It’s been part of a natural progression of the World Wide Web’s development.

USERS AS CONTENT CONSUMERS. All of us consume content on the Web. We read articles, listen to podcasts, watch videos, and play games. Most of our time on the Web is spent consuming information and media.

USERS AS CONTENT CREATORS. Over time, as tools developed, bandwidth increased, and cultural acceptance became more widespread, users took on new roles. Early sites such as The Well were always about user-contributed content, but it was really the advent of blogs that opened the floodgates for users to become publishers of their own creations. (Technorati now tracks nearly 94 million blogs, and estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created daily, with 1.6 million posts being written per day. That’s a lot of user-contributed stuff.)

Online communities and social networks, in addition to blogs, are a vast source of user-generated content.

USERS AS CONTENT MANAGERS. Most of the functionality of tools developed for users to create and publish content is built around the presentation of that content to others. These applications focus on the development of the information (e.g., WYSIWYG editors), the appearance of the content (design and layout capabilities), and how users get to it (e.g., via RSS or Atom feeds). Less attention is paid toward capabilities that give control to the user over who gets to access and interact with the content.

Yet, we see an increasing need and demand for tools that will enable customers to control who does what with the content that they create, as well as the increasing expectations from users that they’ll get this control. It seems reasonable to us…after all, it is their stuff.

What Do Customers Want to Control?

Community members recognize that the community’s sponsor provides the environment and the tools that are essential for any online community to exist. But members also have a sense of ownership, sometimes a very deep sense of this, over what they create. And with ownership comes the desire for control. People aren’t going to contribute content if they can’t control it, at least to a reasonable degree.

We look to content contributors’Customer Scenarios to understand why control is important. These include:

• I want my posts, photos, and videos to be seen by people I designate. (The converse of this is equally important: “I don’t want my content to be seen by certain groups of people, such as prospective employers.)
  
  
• I want to display my photos in a personally meaningful and visually interesting way.
  
  
• I want to decide if/how others can comment on (or rate, or tag, etc.) my stuff.
  
  
• I want to let people use my stuff for free, as long as they show proper attribution.

If you’re a community manager, administrator, or sponsor, you probably think quite a bit about how to enable members to participate in and contribute to the community. But you should also be thinking about the fact that members don’t want just to create content, they want to manage it, too, deciding what they want to create, how it should appear, who gets to interact with it, and how.

Managing What’s Published

Users can create and publish just about any form of information and media. Just about any kind of information or form of media that appears on the Web can be created by users via a site that provides the tools for doing so.

• Text. Includes stories, articles, blog posts, forum posts, responses to posts, recipes, reviews, and a million other things…
  
  
• Media. Includes photographs, animations, music and other audio files, and videos.
  
  
• Other Stuff. Includes application/programming code (such as developers might share), calendar information, Web sites (e.g., bookmarks, such as from Del.icio.us), and virtual merchandise (such as from Second Life or There.com).
  
  
• Personal Information. This is listed separately because we typically consider personal information to be a different type of thing from content such as an article or video. But users should have control over where and how their personal information (e.g., name, email address, work information, etc.) appears to the rest of the community and on the Web.

Managing How It Looks

The degree of control over how one’s content appears to others varies greatly from blog to blog and from community to community. In most online communities and social networks, users have limited control over the design and layout of their stuff. In these cases, the content typically fits into the existing template. And this is usually fine for sites at which the bulk of user-generated content is text.

Some sites, though, particularly those with media applications, give users more control. On Flickr, for example, users can create customized sets of photographs and order them any way they like. Users can’t control the look and feel of the page, but at least users can present their photos, whether as a slideshow or simple listing, in the order they want.

Managing Who Can Access It—Creating Groups and Lists

A fundamental—and frequently overlooked—aspect of content management is control over the audience or audiences. If you’re really letting your customers manage their content, then you’ll let them decide who gets to access it.

The most basic configuration of choices for defining groups that have access to content is everyone (i.e., the content is public) and no one (i.e., the content is private). Illustration 1 shows that the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us goes this route by letting its users choose if they want a specific bookmark shared or not. Shared (the default) means that the bookmark appears in the user’s public bookmark list and can be seen as such by everyone on the Web; “not shared”means that the bookmark in question does not appear in the user’s public list of bookmarks and appears, therefore, only in her own private list.

Del.icio.us Gives Users Two Choices of Audience

© Yahoo! Inc.

Illustration 1. Users of Del.icio.us’social bookmarking site can easily choose if they want a specific bookmark to be public (and viewable as part of their collection by everyone on the Web) or private (and viewable by nobody except themselves).

 

This report continues…

To read the full report: http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=839.