Sue Greenwood is leading a workshop around user generated content:
Sweeblenews - Intended to be a global news site, between citizen journalists and micropayments to international journalists. Sue overestimated people's willingness to do work. They rather Twitter or be interviewed by a journalist. Interesting bits and coding, but "a rubbish site".
Sweeble - Launched in April. Going the other way - trying to get people printing. The local organisation organisers who don't blog or post online. Templated system - and you get a newsletter or brochure out the other end, Again, people are inherently lazy. They don't want to spend hours doing the content, and want a pro to do it for them.
Her next step is thinking about getting local people to tag local information, so you could aggregate it in a useful way. Is my plumber a member of the BNP? What comments have local folks been leaving on blogs?
Trying to motivate people through forums has been a nightmare. Would Facebook Connect allow people to move quickly into such a system? Would a revenue share help bring people in?
People in the room have similar challenges - how do you bring together content on site blogs/forums/stories intelligently?
There seems to be something of a round of "uh, well..." about this discussion. There's been a dismissal of Twitter as a source of citizen journalism (which I disagree with, frankly) and a suggestion that it's much easier to get people to photograph/video/tweet rather than write stuff. But beyond that?
The model seems to be go where people are already. And the moral of this session seems to be that most journalists don't care about user-generated content...
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