Web Analytics Articleon “User Generated Content starts small then snowballs”
“Over time, participation rates throughout the user group increase. In 2004, for example, 90 percent of the contributions to Wikipedia came from just 2 percent of its users; by 2006, the top 2.5 percent of them were responsible for only 60 percent of all new content.”
Thoughts around User Generated Content:
- The Creators
- The Users
- Impact of Creations in VWs
- Does UGC drives VWs interactions
The creators as has been seen are mostly a small percentage who let their creative juices flow and design / create items for the Virtual World in this case.
The users enjoy / utilize the previously generated content for their endeavors, sometimes tweaking them slightly like positioning the created content or compiling different content from various places and putting it all together. An example would be I collect various types of Buildings in Second life, various types of Furniture and then put them in a house that I can then call my own. The very act of compiling different content and putting them in a certain arrangement can count as UGC again as that would be a new permutation. So a user could actually be creator as well. Somebody customizing their avatar to make it look a certain way could actually be UGC as well, since the user doesnt actually create anything new, but chooses a particular combination.
The impact on Virtual Worlds is that it leads to a rich set of environment that can be used by the world. Worlds like Second Life have leveraged this to become highly collaborative in nature and lead to immense amount of participation in their environment. When a person spends time on creating / customizing things they feel more attached to it and tend to build other things around it. So once one customized their avatar, they might want to get an area for their, hence the presence of house lenders in Second Life.