Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

What Tools Exist for User Published Content?

Posted by Cliff on from the welcome-to-the-noosphere dept.

wbav asks: "Recently there's been a trend to user published content. A couple of examples of this trend include Wikis, Podcasting, Blogs, and the resulting RSS Feeds. Last night I was asked if any other similar technologies exist. As I did not have a good response, that is my question to the slashdot community. Are there any other similar technologies which deal with user publishing that I have not mentioned?"

6 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. What about eBooks? by joelsanda · · Score: 4, Interesting

    All of your solutions are about publishing on the web, with the possible exception of podcasting, which you could argue is mp3 player-based. What about ebooks? There are several available for most major PDA platforms, some that WYSIWYG based and others that import from ASCII or HTML.

    --
    The Luddites were ahead of their time.
  2. Look to games by MachDelta · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There's a ton of "user published content" action in the field of PC gaming. Pick just about any recent PC title on the planet, and chances are very good that someone has hacked/modified it and released their findings. Tons of companies nowadays (esp. developers of FPS games) wholeheartedly encourage modding games, releasing docs, developer tools, providing support, and even holding prize contests to encourage the practice.

    Why? Because everyone wins. Its a symbiotic relationship. Mods provide extra content for an already published title, increasing its popularity, longevity, and sales (Half-Life 1, anyone?). The community feeds itself as well as the existing game. And the cherry on top is that plenty of dev studios are recruiting the cream of the mod-scene crop to bolster their own ranks. End result is better games for everyone. :)

  3. Mostly everything. by SharpFang · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There's very few web features that aren't available as a way of delivering user content.
    WWW - everyone can have a webpage.
    FTP, all of the P2P - everyone can host files they have made themselves.
    Forums, BBS, Message Boards, Mailing Lists - based on user content.
    IRC, chats - nothing more pathetic than a dead chat without users.
    Banner ads - all the "banner exchange" style stuff brings it into users' hands.
    Blogs - user-content journalism.
    eBay - user-content e-commerce.
    Development sites like SourceForge - user-content software development ;)
    del.icio.us - hell if I know what it is, but it's all user-content.

    Think of mostly any service or feature of the online world and you'll find user-content counterpart easily. I'd be hard-pressed to find domains without user-content. Ones I could think of... reserved for corporate customers - say, "Microsoft Channel Bar", mostly dead by now, or Windows Update... no, nope. The user-content counterpart for this is called malware.

    --
    45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
  4. IP TV? by wayne606 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Are "ordinary people" creating video content yet? Or are production and bandwidth issues still too challenging?

    The thing about all the technologies you mentioned is that they're all slight tweaks of stuff that's been around for 10 years (web sites, mp3 files) and who knows why that specific tweak was all it took for the technology to take off in some new direction? I guess there's a certain "friction" value that you need to get below for something to reach critical mass.

    The problem with asking the question "what's the next big thing" in any field (such as home-grown content creation and distribution technology) is that the answer is usually "something nobody has thought of before now"...

    1. Re:IP TV? by oneiros27 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yes. It's an offset of podcasting, commonly referred to as 'videocasting' or 'video podcast'.

      iTunes already supports it. (well, it's just using RSS to link to video files, not audio files, which was all podcasting really was)

      There are rumors that here may be updates to the iPod to allow it to play video, although I'd suspect at a major hit to battery life.
      (and well, more cycles on the batteries -> faster battery failure, which wouldn't be a good thing)

      --
      Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
  5. Lulu by emaveneau · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm surprised more people aren't mentioning lulu. You upload, they sell & distribute. Damn simple way to get all the "long tail" content out there.

    Here is a typical example of the content I'm talking about. It's a great film but the distribution is so far out of the scope of the creator that it just isn't worth investing in a personalized eStore, advertising etc.