Compound Media

One of the major components of the Web 2.0 revolution is User Generated Content or UGC to its friends. But while it undoubtedly adds colour and content to the traditional editorial on a site, just how useful is it?

The main problem with UGC is that nobody knows what the content is about. It’s difficult enough getting editorial teams to classify content consistently, so asking users to do this is unlikely to work. Of course we’ve seen the concept of tagging work brilliantly on the likes of Flickr and del.icio.us but even here there are a lot of inconsistencies. People don’t all use the same language, have the same idea about what the content is about and, some just can’t spell.

The upshot of this is twofold. Firstly, its pretty difficult to automatically connect editorial content about a subject to its UGC cousin. There’s no consistent tagging or mapping to enable this to happen automatically. So for example if I were reading an article about tagging, it would be great to see all the member blog posts that were related to that subject.

The second is more important to publishers which is that there is no easy way to target advertising at the readers of UGC. So despite paying $580M for MySpace, NewsCorp couldn’t run any of their conventional display advertising on the site. There was no targeting available other than the basic site demographic. They have solved their commercial problem in the short term by doing a $900M deal with Google to run AdWords on the site. Big advertisers though who want to reach the MySpace audience don’t want to do this through AdWords.

They want their brands and imagery associated with quality, targeted content, not mixed in with all the random ads in AdSense for unrelated products. If you have any doubt about this, have a look at the ads that get served against your emails in GMail for seemingly unrelated products. It’s a great game and depending on the subject matter you can expect to get some spectacular results including one example I found that combined British Airways, satellite TV, the best tennis grip and lingerie. I’ll leave it to you to work out what the email was about…

So what is the answer? Lots of sites have introduced tags as navigation devices either in clouds such as or associated to the stories as on my fovourite site ZDNet. The holy grail is to automatically tag all content consistently across the site whether its editorial, UGC or vendor content such as whitepapers. That creates a consistent way to connect content together and also to identify what its about so as to be able to target advertising.

The new search engine on ZDNet, provided by UltraKnowledge is designed to tag all content consistently regardless of where it originated from. At the moment it is only indexing the editorial content but soon it will be rolled out to the vendor and UGC areas. At that point, it should start to provide the targeting the publishers require to make money from inventory which was previously low value, run of site.