Express Yourself
Madonna sang “Express Yourself” in the 1980s. She was (and still is) a diva queen with a multimillion dollar record label and an audience watching her every move. Along with a very small elite she had the audience which provided the means to impact millions of people around the world. As for the rest of us, our self expression was limited to an intimate small network of people. In 1980, had I been at my current age, I would not have even considered writing these thought blurbs. The barriers of publishing and distribution were far too great to encourage amateur writers like myself to publically express themselves. But these barriers have since disintegrated.
The days of passively sitting back and browsing or zapping through the Internet are over. The exploding trend is for people to lean forward and proactively express their thoughts on the Internet. Today, user generated content (UGC) has increased to include a wide range of interaction from: rating a book, movie, or restaurant, asking a question or providing the answer, publishing a blog or responding in a talkback, uploading pictures or video clips, and interacting on social networks. The Internet census not too long ago measured in eyeball views is now being measured by the amount of content being published daily by you and me. The ease of use, access and free price point have turned the Internet into the ultimate vehicle for modern day self expression.
This wave of enriched media and democratized self expression is breading a new wave of Internet start-ups. Over the last few weeks I have been meeting with cool new start-ups that understand how to convert all this highly unstructured information that you and I provide and add structure to it. They are categorizing our self expression, repackaging it in new interesting ways, redistributing it or syndicating it to other sites, and in some cases use it to analyze what we [the Internet community] are thinking about. Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web are being used to describe a smarter Internet that is able to extract more meaning from the the ever growing sea of digital content.
To get a glimpse of what is possible I recommend you view Jonathan Harris’ talk at TED. He demonstrates a unique graphical interface which shows the emotions being published on the Internet at any given moment.
I Love the TED shows. Always amazing stuff.
Harris’ show really makes you wonder what else can be done with UGC.
I try to be careful around buzzwords like Web 3.0. People tend to use them just to impress other people, only because they heard it somewhere, and they start to lose their value.
I’ve heard enough conversations where the term Web 2.0 was misused. It’s really meant to describe the UGC revolution, but there was a period were it was just overused…