How’s this for ironic timing. As a joke I called an earlier post “I’ve just posted some user-generated content on Flickr” that linked to photos from strolling around Manhattan this afternoon. In Monday’s New York Times there’s a story about marketers’ realization of the value of having their brands photographed in Times Square. No kidding, the article includes the term “consumer-generated pictures.”
Quote:
“As a result of the growing popularity of consumer-generated pictures, videos and e-mail messages on Internet sites like YouTube and Myspace, advertisers are getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them.”
Consumer-generated pictures! If you’re a “marketer,” please be advised: only a complete dork would ever use the phrase “consumer-generated photo.” Here’s a better one for you: “photos taken by people.”
Photo: All over Manhattan today, I saw holiday shoppers taking time to engage in some consumer-generated picture taking.
Technorati Tags: marketing, nyc
From the official Google blog: “The new Geographic Web layer we released today (takes) the rich data of Wikipedia, Panoramio, and the Google Earth Community and (makes) a browsable layer in Google Earth. Now you can fly anywhere in the world and see what people have written about it, photographed, or posted.”
Official rexblog review: Wow.
Technorati Tags: google earth
I went to the blogger ‘meat-up’ in Nashville yesterday afternoon, but haven’t yet been able to post the photos I took due to some technical problems related to forgetting my handy bag of random wires when I headed out to the airport at dark-thirty this a.m. for a quick trip to New York for a dinner tonight (for which all attending have been told everything is ‘bloggable’) and meetings tomorrow. I’m now heading out in search of a sportsbar in which I can view the Titans v. Texans. It’s Christmas time in the city.
Update: Thanks to the kind folks at Stout’s (on 33rd between 5th and 6th), I was able to watch the first half of the game. As today was a picture-perfect beautiful day in New York, it felt un-American not to stroll around with the millions of others enjoying the holiday-decked-out city. So, I left at half time and stuck my head into the ESPN Zone at Times Square to witness yet another storybook finish — the third week in a row. Later, I’ll be posting some of the user-generated-content I took with my camera around the city this afternoon.
(From the NY Times article: “2006, Brought to You by You,” by Jon Pareles) “All that material is “user-generated content,” the paramount cultural buzz phrase of 2006. It’s a term that must appeal to the technocratic instincts of investors. I prefer something a little more old-fashioned: self-expression.”
Sounds good to me: Self-expression. As I’ve blogged before, other good terms for what people are doing instead of “generating” “user-generated content” include: writing, photographing, explaining, inspiring, observing, videoing, witnessing, creating. There are a few hundred more. The term “user-generated content” was obviously dreamed up by those who want to use user-generated content, not by those who actually create it.
