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Digital self expression and user generated content
By Celebrity Trollop | May 31, 2006
You can take the girl out of Silicon Valley, but you can’t take Silicon Valley out of the girl. I found a really interesting post on “Good Morning Silicon Valley”, a tongue-firmly-in-cheek review of the latest headlines from the capital of computer dorkdom. But occasionally, there’s a really nice summary of some big ideas. I thought this was especially appropriate to a user content driven environment like Second Life:
Writing in GigaOM, Robert Young says, “Today’s social networks (along with other forms of social media, like blogging and online video-sharing) are just the tip of iceberg when it comes to the long-term potential of digital self-expression. … To some extent, self-expression should be viewed as a new industry, one that will co-exist alongside other traditional media industries like movies, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines.
Another interesting factoid about the people who create content and share it — most of it is original work — and the vast majority of those creators have broadband Internet access:
[T]he latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project … found that 48 million American adults — 35 percent of Internet users — have contributed some form of user-generated content to the Internet (that’s adults — you’ll have to factor in all the kids posting to MySpace and the like). Of those users, 36 million posted their own artwork, photos, stories and videos. Empowering this urge to share is broadband penetration — of those who contributed content to the Net, the report found, 73 percent had high-speed connections.
I think this struck a chord because I’ve been thinking about what happened to Lost Thereian’s skins, and numerous hair creator’s textures. A serious challenge for Linden Labs — it seems to me — is implementing more flexible and granular permission controls for content. I can envision the utility of taking that new permission system down to the individual prim and texture level, even — although I believe the cost in doing all that database work might be prohibitively expensive. (One example use case, as it applies to prim hair: this hair texture is licensed under the Creative Commons license so you can pull it out of a hair and re-use it, but that one is proprietary, so it’s isn’t available for modification or reuse.)
Leaving aside the volatility of the Linden Dollar itself for a moment, these kinds of trends should be heartening to content creators in Second Life. They are basically the first wave of content producers who specialize in digital self expression in a way that goes beyond snapshots of the family cat and links to “this cool new band I like.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with that kind of content!) And no doubt if writers like Hamlet Au and Walker Spaight are correct, there will be this kind of content in the 3D web too.
Topics: Business of Fashion, Opinion |
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