Get down with UGC - Never been a better time to be creative..

Five years ago you submitted your demo CD to a music label, it sat on a desk with the pile they’d received that day, and you’d be lucky it got heard. If you made the cut they would sign you up to a tidy iron-clad agreement, they’d ‘lend’ you some cash, you’d have a neat matt-printed gatefold ep and if you’re half decent you may just recoup your costs.

Welcome UGC – user generated content. It’s an acronym that’s been thrown around on the latest client brief ‘mandatories’, and usually sits around slide five on the ‘how to do web2.0’ presentation. But only now are we seeing it starting to hit paydirt for the U in UGC. I’ve always felt creativity was undervalued, but if you produce music, film or graphic art, now’s never been a better time to reap the rewards.

It was providers like YouTube that gave us the tools to make it dead easy, the user’s drove the content, then the providers started to monetize - Ad revenue for UGC is expected to top 1 billion this year. And now it’s the brands that are serious about getting a slice of this action.

The music world was one of the first to benefit, I was lucky to take out the Nokia Connecting Beats competition in ’05, a trip to the UK and an east coast tour, no elaborate contracts, no product sponsorships, no creative control. Now there’s opportunity everywhere, from your Unearthed to your Toohey’s Extra Dry uncharted, offering some serious rewards and exposure.

And next is video. With an estimated 300 billion eyeballs watching video online, YouTube has sped up the opportunities for video producers. This week MyspaceTV launched The Storyteller Challenge, an initiate for video producers offering $25k and a potential deal with FOX in the states. Al Gore’s Current.TV has been offering cash for user generated ads for a while now. And there’s a new competition every day if you have 5 minutes and a handycam. See Sony or Fosters.

If you’ve got talent there’s an active worldwide audience a few clicks away and some serious brands willing to be associated with your content. It’s a great time for creative types and as the audience for this content skyrockets, so to will the opportunities.

Google - Painting the town AdSense

The team over at Ia have put together another update of their successful WebTrends Map, I think maybe this time they've got a little clever with the icons and classifiers, or maybe the web 2.0+ world is getting a little messier, but it makes for a cool desktop wallpaper, and there's always a few interesting additions worth a look.

One of the permanent fixtures on the map, which shares one of the biggest font sizes is Google. While the spotlight slightly deviates off Google and onto Facebook (Josh Cantone is asking Is Facebook Worth the Hype?), it's interesting to note their continued developments in doing what they do best - contextual advertising.

They're soon to launch Adsense advertising for web-based games, with PC and console games to come. They say it's currently a 4.1billion dollar online market currently dominated by subscription revenue, by 2012 around 13billion. Be interesting to see how Google will play in this market, and how gamers react to ads on there latest $109.95 PS3 game.

And then there's Google TV AdSense. Google taking AdSense to the TV set. Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, makes a very compelling case for the advantages of contextual advertising on television, and it makes a lot of sense. But I don't buy his argument that understanding which ads people skip and which they watch helps build a better understanding of what ads people like. People skip ads period, it ain't Superbowl 24-7.

With their share price taking a 7% cut, and while their still working out how to monetize their aquisitions - insert YouTube here - it'll be a challenging 12 months for Sergey and Larry. How long can they maintain such growth whilst continuing to "do no evil"?

Social networking - a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch.

I was watching Stranger than Fiction last night, and in some ways it reminded me that we are becoming our own Karen Eiffel, narrating our own lives through posts/twitters/blogs/IM’s. Glenn is brushing his teeth 56 times, Glenn is walking 102 steps to catch the tram. It also concerns me about the increasing amount of time we now spend on telling people what we are doing at the expense of what we could be doing.

I see this improving with automated location - a Twittervision teamed up with Dodgeball tied to an IP/mobile provider, gone local. Now we just need something to automate emotion, next level smiley faces ;)

Yahoo! seem to be having another crack at social networking, with Yahoo! Mosh, after their failed attempt with Yahoo!360, which I thought nailed the UI but was far too slow and needed that all important critical reach which it never achieved in the face of the myspace storm. While still hidden from us preview over at Techcrunch doesn’t look too inspiring, and I can’t help thinking there really need some outstanding functionality to compete with team Facebook.

More interesting is Nokia’s attempt of the same name, I think the mobile manufacturers have real potential to infiltrate the social networking space. The numbers add up, 15% of the worlds population bought a mobile in ’06 (MIC), a 25% increase from the previous year, around the 2.3 billion mark now, frightening stats. Around a third in the US accessed the mobile web in some form, the WIFI’d N95’s and iPhones of this world will help push this percentage up. Let’s hope Nokia get it right, they have a history of developing great ideas for apps that seem to get lost in the execution, ala Music Recommenders.

And I’m still waiting for the master profile login, a .net passport profile done right. One to keep an eye on will be the Google influenced Socialstream, certainly looks like the one to watch in this space.

Glenn is.. Facebooking

I always thought it was odd while you could delete posts on your Facebook mini-feed, the news feed all your 'friends' see is open slather on any changes you make. So did 740,000 other users last year. As network sizes grow, I can only imagine so will Zuckerburg's headaches if they don't sort this one out.



But the Facebook train rolls on, graphs curve upward and the comparisons to MySpace continue. And while on the surface the stats are stacked well in the favour of MySpace - 28 mill accounts v 187 mill - at last count, when you look at the growth rate, with MySpace ticking over at approx. 230k accounts p/day , Facebook is mowing this down with an impressive 2.9% growth rate week on week, at 500k+ new accounts per week. And you need only look at news trends and hear the conversations at the coke machine to witness the hype.



I'd like to think this is a nice tip of the hat to Mr Jakob Nielsen, a classic case of usability and design, a satisfying user experience bringing users back each day. I also think Facebooks ability to classify and categorise friends gives it a lot more solid foundation as a linked-inesque networking tool, although I think this can still be improved. "The stronger the social tie, the more likely it is to be supportive and able to excerpt influence on the participants... Ties which are maintained across different social settings tend to be stronger than 'uniplex' ties, which are limited to a specific type of relationship" (John Cotterall). If a social networking service can start to measure and categorise the true strength of these relationships, then I can see this painting a far finer profile picture, and adding true value to the current tick-the-box-add friend network model.



It will be an interesting landscape to watch over the coming months. With Friendster experiencing a 40% growth in page views in May, it seems like social networking pie is growing bigger. Networks are expanding into different parts of the world as are people's ability to manage multiple logins.