A while ago, I bought one of those Creative VADO videocams. Really cool gadget, great for creating short clips and publishing them to the likes of YouTube for sharing.

If you have good content to film, of course. And that’s the problem with user-generated content. The web is filled with rubbish – videos of pets (like my first VADO production), pointless blogs (er….. moving right along),  inane comments and so on.

Its not that the technology isn’t there to support the creation of great user-generated content – the current version of WordPress truly means anyone can create and manage their own stuff these days. And the changes proposed with the new HTML 5 standard will make it even easier for webmasters to enable it on commercial sites.

Its all about what’s published. And has been ever since the web really took hold in the late 90′s. Back then the mantra was CONTENT IS KING and its still the same today.

The big difference is that in these web 2.0 days, the “content” in question is far more likely to be user-generated.

USER-GENERATED CONTENT IS KING. I predict that will be the emerging message for 2009.

And that presents interesting challenges but also opportunities for organisations that work to embrace user-generated content on their own platforms for commercial gain.

Just how exactly to make money from it.

It requires innovative thinking – the idea of simply building your own community and hoping users will populate it and stick around has proven to be difficult for all but niche organisations. And adding ratings and reviews tools to sites is also now so commonplace as not to provide commercial advantage anymore.

There are some good examples of using user-generated content in non commercial organisations such as change.org. But I’ve not seen that many on commercial sites.

However, ideas such as inviting guest bloggers to post (Jamie Oliver perhaps, on a cookery site), and encouraging user collaboration around producing a film script (e.g. which a tv site could then fund the production of) might be worth exploring.

Basically targeting certain users as content creators or guiding users as a group through creating content that an organisation can then add the final touches to, to monetarise.

Just a thought. Right, better get on with publishing my next bad video to YouTube.