Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 3 October 2007 at 15:30
Tags: Guardian Unlimited, Sun Online, UK AOP
Mike Butcher of Techcrunch UK is moderating a panel on interactivity and user-generated content and how it integrates with the traditional editorial process. THe panel features Meg Pickard of Guardian Unlimited, What Car publishing director Patrick Fuller, Alison Wheeler of Wikimedia and Sun Online editor Pete Picton.
Patrick Fuller says WhatCar is Haymarket Online’s most successful product — gaining more revenue than the print product, which is also the group’s biggest consumer magazine.
But in January this year, Haymarket purchased Pistonheads, a user-generated content site for car enthusiasts. The site now has 1.3 million uniques, says Fuller. Page impressions have grown 300 per cent in eight months, from 25m to 75m. growth in pi in 8 months. 25m to 75m page impressions. Revenues are up 300 per cent since January.
The site has no obvious “Web 2.0″ features — the users are very familiar with the site, and sometimes react badly to new
Users like the site to be “a bit bedroom” — somewhat untidy, but it’s mine. This contrasts tot he way car makers and adagencies want to see it — like a posh hotel suite. Crucisally, it really works. It’s simple and effective.
Meg Pickard, Guardian Unlimited’s head of communities, promises to be wooly and vague a befits her background as an academic anthropologist. She suggests four ways users now interact with readers:
- Consumption: we create, they read. This is the most familiar model. But just reading is now an act of creation, because it affects the way information is presented, for example by pushing it up “most read lists.
- Contribution: Users submit their material to the wider product - “user generated content”
- Curation: User-curated content is when users tag or recommend items, or annotation of sources. This can go on on your own site, or via external filtering tools like Digg, Del.icio.us or Squidoo. THis makes passionate users evangelists. Sometimes they are more expert than the . Mashups are an example of user curation, as well.
- Creation. Finally, a very high-level of behaviour.
There is an increase in the amount of activity that the user must apply. People don’t really follow this model. People interact at various levels of this continuum.
Readers who are all in the same bus queue are not a community. But when they start producing content
The phrase use to be content is king, but now perhaps “context is king”, where media properties provide the context of material that people use.
Pickard says there is now a “holy trinity of community managemnt”:
- Human solutions - hire moderators and create processes
-
- Technical solutions - things like reputation engines and other ways to ease moderation and filter goood content from bad. But this takes a long time
- Editorial solutions - If you don’t know why your users should be involved, then neither do they.
Sun Online editor Pete Picton starts with the Web 0.0 edition of the Sun, circa 1973. There was already a huge amount of User-supplied information at the time. Letting readers lose on the site was He shows a rude email from an irate reader. Why would we let people like this loose on our site?
But now the Sun runs MySun, which give users a space to comment and discuss. A year on, users seem to like the Sun. 75,000 and over 2m pageviews. It provides a lot of stories back to the paper through MySun and through the mobile shortcode. This has provided splases like “Hamza’s Hook on NHS”, “Triplets at 16″, and of course, “Pete Doherty’s cat is on crack“. IT has also spawned “managment generated content” when Sun staff outside the office like when deputy manging editor Mike Gordon sent a mobile phone video from the site.
Then, Picton’s announcement: next week, the Sun will be launching a Kelvin McKenzie section on MySun. No doubt this will generate a very large pile of those rude e-mails from his, er, outspoken fans in Liverpool.
Wikimedia chief exec Alison Wheeler on why Wikimedia works. The feelgood factor, she says, explains why people contribute to the articles. It’s important to understand that Wikipedia is always a work in progress and must therefore be treated as such. It’s also important to understand that it is open to re-use.
Butcher asks the panel some questions about how UGC will become more integrated into their sites. Picton says it will likely continue to be see n as a source of tips which willl lead to exclusive sotires when it has been checked by the traditional editorial process.
Pickard says GU already uses “attention data” to place stories on the front page, in “most read”-type lists. This is likely to be extended. Curation is also likelty to increase as the GU relaunch is rolled out. The keyword tagging in the Guardian Travel section is a likely a good example of how it might work.
Pickard says there probably won’t be a “Sandalbook”, a Guardian-owned Facebook for liberal people. If they are already using other sites, the key is to “play where they are playing”, says Pickard. Similarly, the Sun is trying to go where the users are, says Picton. The Sun is using widgets on Facebook to bring people into the site from where they are. It is also experimenting with aggregating with other News Corp sites. PlanetNews, PlanetSport, and PlanetSowbiz aggregates news sites like the New York Post.
Journalists need to learn noew ways of writing for the web — but also new ways of reading, says Pickard. They will need to learn to take criticism, because sometimes they are right.
