So how come most organizations shy away from incorporating UGC on their sites?

I think it’s because most organizations are not equipped to deal with UGC, good, bad or indifferent.  And they are deathly  afraid of negative comments.  Here’s my take on UGC, why it’s here to stay and why most organizations need a UGC strategy:

• UGC can take many forms. A magazine site that allows visitors to rate articles support UGC.  A store that allows ratings supports UGC.  A blog that welcomes comments invites UGC.
• Sites that welcome UGC invite participation. And participation by the right people encourages more participation and more followers.
• UGC lets you tap into the expertise and experiences of your members, customers, and partners, which will enrich the content you provide.
• Supporting UGC on your site or application does not mean that you lose control. You can set up guidelines and moderate comments.  On this blog, for example, all comments are immediately posted but I get notifications and I spam (delete) all comments that look spammy. Yes, I get the occasional snarky or negative comment, but unless the post contains profanity, I leave it on the site.  The New York Times recently announced that Wikipedia, the site built on UGC, will soon impose a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.
• Celebrating UGC lets you tap into most visitors’ need for true interaction with you and your organization. I read every comment on this blog and respond personally when I get a request for information or assistance.  I believe these interactions have helped Matrix Group make followers out of readers.
• If your organization is suffering from criticism re: transparency and responsiveness, UGC can help you face your critics directly. The Direct Selling Association launched a blog 18 months ago to counter false perceptions about direct selling.  Although apprehensive about allowing comments in real-time, the organization decided it needed to make a strong statement about integrity and transparency.  The results have been great.  Negative comments are opportunities to address criticisms and myths.  More importantly, the negative comments have been few and far between.
• Supporting UGC is also a wonderful way to let your staff, clients, partners and friends network and share their experiences. I was moved by the dozens of memories that members of the Matrix family posted to our 10th anniversary microsite.  I didn’t know about some of the antics and every single post was a treat!

How about you?  What’s your take on user-generated content?  What are your favorite UGC sites?  Has your organization taken the UGC plunge?

Cooliris lets me scroll through images and videos on my computer and sites that support Cooliris.  For example, if I want to browse photos from my son’s birthday party, I point Cooliris to the proper directory and the photos will appear as a wall of photos in my browser.  I can scroll through the images by using my mouse to drag images, or I can use the Cooliris scroll tool.

It turns out that many of my favorite sites now support Cooliris, like Flickr, Facebook, Hulu, images from Google,and Getty Images.  I can tell if a site support Cooliris if I hover an image and the double squares appear in the lower left corner of the image.  I can then click on the double squares to launch the photo album, collection of photos or RSS of images and videos in Cooliris.

It’s super fun to browse friends’ albums in Facebook in Cooliris without having to press Next, Next, Next.  And I love being able to surf hundreds of images in Getty Images in one long wall of photos.

Is Cooliris here to stay?  Who knows?  It’s free, it’s cool, it’s convenient and it’s fun to play.  Check it out and let me know what you think!

10 years feels like a real milestone to us, especially to me. Like I say in my “Where We’re Going” letter, when I started the company, I wasn’t thinking about balance sheets or Web standards. I just wanted to help companies with their Web sites. And when my Advisory Board Chair asked me about my five-year plan (during year one), I just laughed; I was so focused on surviving the first year, five years felt like a lifetime.  So it felt right to create a microsite that lets all of us at the company see where we’ve been and think about the future.

We also wanted to create a showcase piece for the company, one that invited a lot of clicking to learn more and let us create some far out designs we don’t normally get to do.  I love, love,  love timelines, so we scoured our project notes and intranet and created an interactive timeline with important dates, factoids and photos.  We also adore information design, so the Fun Facts portion of the site is a tribute to information design. Finally, I was dying to launch a Twitter visualization project, so ours shows off tweets from the company, the staff, and people we’re following, as well as tweets about topics we follow (Web standards, social media, yada, yada.)

Finally, we want to use the microsite to let clients, partners, staff and alumni share their favorite Matrix Group stories.   Share Your Memory is letting us capture some great stories from the past ten years!

If you’ve got an anniversary or important milestone coming up, think about a microsite!  Let us know how we can help or send us a link!

I just got back from a week in Mexico.

If you read The Washington Post, you’ll think we were insane to go. The Post has stories about swine flu pretty much every day.  I count no less than 10 stories that feature or mention swine flu in today’s online edition of the Post.  The Post also tells me that the World Health Organization is set to declare swine flu a global pandemic.

So why did we decide to go?  First of all, what was not widely reported was that the CDC downgraded its travel advisory from a recommendation against non-essential travel to a travel health precaution.  Second, reviews from bloggers in the US and Mexico assured us that Playa del Carmen and the Yucatan Peninsula were safe, having pretty much zero cases of swine flu.  This, despite, the news media reporting that swine flu was all over Mexico.  I found this blog post by Toni and Cheri useful, TripAdvisor (one of my favorite sites for travel and restaurant reviews) had a whole forum devoted to swine flu and Playa del Carmen, and a Google map of swine flu cases around the world showed no confirmed or reported cases close to where we were going.  All of this information, together, reassured me that I would not be putting my family’s health in jeopardy by going on this trip.

What’s fascinating to me is how, once again, I relied on local sites, bloggers and peer reviewers to give me the inside scoop, which seemed to contradict the story I was getting from national, mainstream media. The Pew Research Center would call me an Integrator because I “get the news from both traditional sources and the internet.” However, there is a segment called Net-Newsers “who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources.”

I’m not about to abandon reading The Post, The New York Times, CNN, etc.  I will, however, continue to blend mainstream news with reviews, blogs and articles by bloggers and peer reviewers.  In some instances, I will probably give more weight to what a mommy blogger has to say about a topic (or product or movie) than the most famous or  award-winning journalist.

How about you?  What sources of news and information do you find most credible?

I can give you all kinds of reasons why I love Twitter. It’s terrific for knowing what my friends are up to, it’s a great way to promote my company and blog, but most of all, I love the crazy variety of sites and pages I learn about. My favorite tweeters are people who introduce me to new sites, interesting statistics, gorgeous photos, and news articles I would otherwise never chance upon. One of my favorite tweeters is Guy Kawasaki. Some of the recent gems I learned about from Guy are: 9 resistance-boosting foods and ingredients to help you win the cold war, 50 of the world’s best food blogs, and 10 evolution stories Darwin would love.  I suspect that Guy spends all day trolling the Web or has a vast staff that does same and then he tweets the coolest and most interesting of his finds.  Thanks, Guy!

My other love is StumbleUpon.  Here’s how it works.  You create a profile, indicate your interests, then download the StumbleUpon Web plug-in, which then adds a new toolbar to your browser.  From your  browser, you press the Stumble! button and get taken to a seemingly random site that others who share your interests have given the thumbs up.  You then have the option of giving the site the thumbs up or down, or you can do nothing.  Over time, StumbleUpon is supposed to learn what you like, based on your special interests AND the sites that you have given the thumbs up.  While having my soup at lunch yesterday, StumbleUpon took me to: the ReadPrint free online library, gorgeous black and white photos of animals from Nick Brandt, and Newsmap, which lets me access news headlines from around the world.  BTW, StumbleUpon reportedly has over 7M users and is driving an enormous amount of traffic to sites worldwide.  Be sure to check your usage reports to see if StumbleUpon is sending visitors your way.

I don’t know about you, but until recently, I felt like I was in a Web browsing rut.  I went to the same sites every day and I wasn’s straying from my normal surfing routines.  Twitter and StumbleUpon have introduced me to new sites and new perspectives.  God bless all this user-generated content!

But here’s a news flash: an increasing of us are getting our news from citizen journalist sites, or sites that feature news, photos and videos from people like you and me. Armed with camera phones and video cameras, average folks are reporting on news in their neighborhood and covering news from their perspective.

Here are some of the most popular citizen journalist sites and why I love them:

• NowPublic is now one of my favorite news sites. Last weekend, NowPublic had lots of coverage about the earthquake in Indonesia. When I mentioned the earthquake to a client, she said, “what earthquake?”
• Topix has a combination of syndicated news and user-generated news. I love that my home page is automatically personalized with Alexandria, VA news, even though I haven’t registered; I think they do a reverse DNS look-up against my IP address and determine my location.
• IReport boasts that thousands of its user-generated stories have been used on CNN. I love the top tags and the ability to view the stories by highest rated, most viewed, most commented, and most shared.

The Pew Research Center says “the audiences for most traditional news sources have steadily declined, as the number of people getting news online has surged.” Today, I can read about an earthquake in Indonesia even if mainstream media doesn’t cover it, or only covers it sparingly. Wow.

You’ll be glad to know that there is a whole movement devoted to changing the content of the Internet from ephemera to artifacts. Internet libraries are springing up everywhere to catalog and preserve Web pages, images, even audio and video files.

The largest (I think) Internet Library is the Internet Archive, a “nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of Web.” The archive is a collection of snapshots of Web pages from the around the world, taken at various points in time.

Use the Wayback Machine, type in your company’s URL and try not to cringe as you browse pages from five years ago. Check out the archive for the Matrix Group Web site; talk about a trip down memory lane.

The Internet Archive also has special Web collections (or links) for specific topics, like the Asian Tsunami or the 2002 Election. Just think about how much content is online from this year’s election and how much of the news and information you relied on to make your choice is online. The question is: will it be online next year and what will we have lost as a society when that content is gone?

Other terrific Internet libraries include:

• Online Computer Library Center
• Alexa Internet
• Library of Congress
• Project Gutenberg
  
• World Digital Library
• Alexandria Digital Library

In addition, Google takes a snapshot of each page it examines and caches (stores) that version as a back-up. That’s why every search results page on Google has a link to the page and the cached version, which is what Google indexes and searches.

Thank goodness for libraries!

While CNN, MSNBC, and all the networks showed the same footage of the Hilton’s wall falling off, and the Houston highway that was six feet under water, my in-laws wanted to know how their Clear Lake neighborhood was doing.  Did everyone evacuate?  Is everyone okay?  Did the bayou flood?  How much tree damage was there?  Does the neighborhood have power?

Slowly, and then more rapidly, especially by Monday afternoon, we got lots of information from the citizen journalists of Houston.

Here is a YouTube video of a couple driving down the highway looking for their boat.  This road is close to where my in-laws live.

A teenager chronicled the arrival of Hurricane Ike on YouTube; click on related videos; he has a whole series.

The local radio station, KHOU, hosts a forum about specific Houston neighborhoods.  We got great information about the Clear Lake neighborhood, including power and damage reports.

The Houston Chronicle encourages citizens to report on electricity being restored, and then compiles the information on a grid and a Yahoo! map. Fabulous!

Contrast the Chronicle site with that of Reliant Energy, the local power company.  On Sunday, the site reported that 90% of their customers had no power and basically said, “don’t call us, we know you don’t have power.”  No updates on where work was being done, and no estimates on when power would be restored.  Reliant finally put up a storm center microsite but it still contains scant information.  I give it a thumbs down for usefulness and timeliness.

In “We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information,” Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis describe citizen journalists as “active participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information.” It seems that professional journalists are no longer the exclusive gatekeepers of the news.  Don’t you love the Web?

P.S.  Since many of you have asked, I’m pleased to report that my in-laws and their home are fine.  They went home on Tuesday to find that their property sustained a lot of tree damage, but thankfully, the house suffered no flooding, just minor cosmetic damage.  Even the power is back on.

Some of the Web 2.0 applications I like:

• Bubbles – http://bubbleshq.com/ – your social life on your desktop
• ekko TV – http://www.ekko.tv/ – instantly start a video chat with 2 of your friends
• Lunchn – http://www.lunchn.com/about.aspx – where are you going for lunch? (my husband’s favorite)
• Luminotes – https://luminotes.com/ – personal wiki notebook
• FeedTweeter – http://www.feedtweeter.com/ – feeds your RSS items to Twitter with some spice
• Wallowr Air – http://wallowr.com/air.php – aggregates social networking tools into one simple spot
• Lookybook – http://lookybook.com/ – an online page by page previews of children’s books

I am going to go crazy checking out all these sites and applications.  How long do you think it will take to check out 2520 sites?  That could be a perpetual project, seeing as new applications are sprouting everyday, including apps developed on top of other apps.  I don’t know how anybody can keep up!

Orli Yakuel, editor of the popular blog – http://blog.go2web20.net/ – writes about the ever-evolving Web 2.0 industry. You can read her perspective on what’s hot, what’s not, and why.

Be sure to let me know about your favorite Web 2.0 applications.  I’d also like to hear about your least favorite ones and why.