Comments for Defining User Generated Content; Or, Digg Is Too a UGC Site

Defining User Generated Content; Or, Digg Is Too a UGC Site

2008-01-21T20:19:20Z

In post on his blog today, my friend Allen Stern takes issue with Digg winning the "Best User Generated Content Site" award at Friday night's Crunchies Awards. Allen, who provided the web with excellent live blogged coverage of the event based on the video stream describes the scene online after Digg's win: "The chat room went off on the selection simply because Digg is not a user-generated content site."

]]> "With Digg, you find a good piece of content, and then submit a link to that story on Digg. That's it. The Digg submitter submits 250 characters to describe the story but 97.85% of the time, the submitter is pulling the description from your story," argues Stern. But he is overlooking one major part of Digg: the comments.

According to Wikipedia (a site Stern specifically cites as an example of UGC), user generated content "refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users." Wikipedia lists discussion boards as a type of UGC site (it even lists Digg as an example of a user generated content web site). Digg's comments act in very much the same way as a discussion board -- encouraging people to comment on news stories, videos, and images (very often leading to more comments than are made on the original source article).

Stern's objection to Digg being a user generated content site seems to focus around the word "content" -- as Stern argues, much of the submitted content is unorginal. But the comments on Digg, no matter how useless some might find them, are original media content provided by the users for publication on Digg -- which is enough to fit the Wikipedia definition, at least (and this is why we might say the comments section on any media site are an example of user generated content). In some cases, Digg provides utility for users to respond to content that doesn't allow commenting at the original source (i.e., many mainstream news articles). These responses qualify as user generated content in my opinion.

But even if you agree with Stern that Digg is light on user generated content (and there is certainly a case to be made there), there is no denying that Digg is a user generated site. Digg has very little -- if any -- editorial oversight, and the content on the site is dictated by users. As the HD DVD crack episode last May showed us, Digg may not have much control over its users do with the site's content at all.

That said, while I think it is fine to call Digg a user generated content site, I see Stern's point. When you say "user generated content" you think of YouTube or Wikipedia before you think of Digg -- i.e., the sites that immediately come to mind are those where there is a major creative element to the content being contributed by users. But if Digg isn't a user generated content site, it is certainly a user something site. So how about this: user managed content site. (You can even drop the word "content" if you'd like.)

What do you think? Is Digg a user generated content site? Let us know in the comments below.

Comment from Sean Tierney on 2008-01-21

2008-01-21T22:11:30Z

It's absolutely a UGC site- it sounds like Allen is hung up on semantics. All the value of Digg in both the ratings and the comments is coming from one source, the community. If there was an editorial board that had final say in what got posted (like the now-defunct Netscape site) then it would be debatable but it's clearly user-generated in it's current form.

sean

Comment from Me on 2008-01-21

2008-01-21T22:29:40Z

It is absolutely NOT a UGC site, because it does not 'generate' anything (unless you call list creation generation). It's a UGC aggregator, that's it pure and simple.

Comment from Deepak on 2008-01-21

2008-01-22T01:51:48Z

If the value of Digg lies in the comments, the site is in great trouble. The comments are among the #1 reasons I rarely use Digg.

Is it a UGC site? That's actually a great question. To me Digg is an example of the wisdom (?) of crowds rather than UGC, since what it does is allow the crowds to determine good content, but Digg aggregates content as #2 points out, but one could argue that it's all semantics

Comment from RBA on 2008-01-21

2008-01-22T02:15:25Z

Forget the semantics. Compared to other UGC sites such as YouTube or Flickr, Digg scales very very very low as a UGC site, for many reasons. So winning that award does stretch the definition of what a UGC site is, and Allen does make a very good point.

Comment from Scott Lawton (Blogcosm) on 2008-01-21

2008-01-22T03:16:41Z

Even ignoring the comments, the up/down ratings by users make it different than a "mere" aggregator.

Comment from Nate Westheimer on 2008-01-21

2008-01-22T06:47:35Z

it's a user generated website, but not a user generated content site... the content lies elsewhere (and the comments aren't the focus enough -- 3rd string to the voting and outgoing links? -- to be considered "the content")

Comment from Owen Byrne on 2008-01-22

2008-01-22T16:45:15Z

I think links are content. Let's do a little exercise - does techmeme.com have content? If it does, then digg has content. If it doesn't then why do people go there? Links and their ranking are a form of content.

Comment from Nate Westheimer on 2008-01-22

2008-01-22T22:05:17Z

Techmeme doesn't have content. It links to content.

Comment from Free Classifieds on 2008-01-22

2008-01-23T03:33:11Z

Digg is user generated content site. For site content, Digg does not have to do any thing except providing the tool. Users submit contents to the site. In the same token, forums are user generated content sites, so also the classified sites, dating sites, etc. It is not like blogs, news sites like CNN etc., where dedicated stuff creates contents for the sites.