The Xplor View - July 2008 - (Page 17)

The experts vs the amateurs: A tug of war over the future of media Professor Kevin Werbach, Wharton legal studies and business ethics Professor Peter Fader, Professor of Marketing Kendall Whitehouse, Wharton Senior Director of Information Technology Joel Waldfogel, Wharton business and public policy professor A tug of war over the future of media may be brewing between so-called user-generated content—including amateurs who produce blogs, video, and audio for public consumption—and professional journalists, movie makers, and record labels, along with the deep-pocketed companies that back them. The likely outcome: a hybrid approach built around entirely new business models, say experts at Wharton. According to a recent Newsweek article titled, “Revenge of the Experts,” and books such as Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, the pendulum between user-generated content and the professional variety has swung too far in favour of amateurs. In response, professional fare is gaining renewed favour. User-generated content encompasses discussion boards, blogs, social networking outlets such as MySpace, websites like Digg that rank news items based on popularity, customer review aggregators, photo sharing networks, and any other property that “offers the opportunity for consumers to share their knowledge and familiarity with a product or experience,” according to Wikipedia, itself a userauthored site. YouTube, eBay, MySpace, and Flickr are well known sites largely fuelled by user-created content. But the user-generated revolution is clearly not over. Professional content companies are betting on the longevity of user-generated sites by acquiring them. News Corp., the parent company of Fox Broadcasting, owns MySpace; AOL, owned by Time Warner, paid USD $850 million for social networking site Bebo on March 13; The New York Times owns About.com and Blogrunner, a site that aggregates and ranks prominent blogs. Experts at Wharton disagree on where the Internet content pendulum sits and whether it’s worth fretting over the short-term swings between professional and amateur content. Peter Fader and Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach say fears about user-generated content are misplaced. “It’s absurd to say the pendulum is swinging back to professional content. User-generated content has just been born,” says Fader. There is little evidence to suggest that it takes market share from the professional variety, he adds. Others, such as Joel Waldfogel, Wharton business and public policy professor, and Kendall Whitehouse, senior director of IT at Wharton, say that while amateur content may not always favourably compare to its carefully vetted and professionally produced cousin, both play key roles in public discourse. And Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, suggests this alleged tug of war between professional and amateur content on the web is largely moot because the lines are so blurry between the two categories in the first place. “Amateur content is not easy to discern,” says Turow. “Someone posing as an individual on message boards or blogs may be representing a company. Is that an amateur? There are too many forces at work trying to spin things.” Indeed, the process of separating the good information from the bad is easier said than done. Part of the problem is that user-generated content encompasses a broad set of categories. Can you trust a YouTube video more than a blog post? Does a consumer review of a product have more credibility than a first-hand report http://About.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of The Xplor View - July 2008

The Xplor View - July 2008 Contents Cover Story: Drupa 2008: The Highlights Review New Technology: Inkjet Technologies Moving Forward New Technology: QR Codes: Leading Edge but not Bleeding Edge A Fresh Look at Electronic Document Delivery Management: Growing Your Business Through Tendering The Experts Versus the Amateurs News: Xplor UK & Ireland Supports Total Print! Expo� Part Two: The Latest Developments in Knowledge Management Xplor Europe News: Short News Items for the Xplor UK Programme and Europe News

The Xplor View - July 2008

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