eMarketer predicts that the number of people who create "user-generated" content will rise from 77 million in 2007 to 108 million in 2012.
On the one hand, that is a big number. On the other, this is the information age, and the Internet is a two-way media so it makes sense that this increasingly becomes a medium where we both consume AND generate/create content.
Towards that end, it also seems logical that applications will emerge that help us take a more unified approach to organizing, managing and publishing our profusion of posts, pictures, videos, comments, tracked discussion threads, playlists and profiles.
Some people think of this bucket as a social map, the amalgam of social media, our network of connections and online breadcrumb paths.
Recently, on GigaOM, I wrote a guest column that expands on the concept of social maps, and envisions some application kernels that support it.
Here is an excerpt from the post:
Isn’t this the moral of the story regarding iTunes, iPhoto and the iPod/iPhone? Namely, that whether blogging, YouTube’ing, Flickr’ing, Digg’ing or tweet’ing, the “forever” bucket is the bucket consisting of my content, my contacts, my contexts and my conversations.
This suggests that regardless of where any of these informational breadcrumbs may originate, each of us needs to think of ourselves as the center of our respective social map universes. In other words, the social map — in order for it to be considered a map – needs to systematically connect the dots between me, my content and my network. A map-lication of sorts.
Check out the full post HERE.
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