Adding user-generated content
Last week, the National Magazine Company, Hearst Corporation's main business in Britain, announced the creation of the Hearst Digital Network. The news came on the heels of its £22m acquisition of the women's portal Handbag.com and its network of websites from the Telegraph Group.
Keeping up the momentum, NatMag has relaunched the Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Country Living sites as part of a serious revamp and the idea is that along with chat, the future focus will be on user-generated content such as blogs and other kind of Web 2.0 widgets. All this was being done as Jakob Nielsen was mulling over the matter and formulating his 90-9-1 rule about user-generated content. In the words of the Great Dane:
* 90 percent of users are voyeurs.
* 9 percent contribute from time to time.
* 1 percent account for most contributions.
Can anything be done about this? Not really, says Jakob. Well, you can tweak the ratio to your advantage if you make it easier for users to contribute and by promoting quality contributors. But that's about it. Sharp as ever, though, Nielsen notes that a site's design "undoubtedly influences participation inequality for better or worse", and his bottom line is that "finding ways to broaden participation will become even more important as the Web's social networking services continue to grow." Tomorrow, here, how the Times and NPR are uniting to generate "content" the old-fashioned, trans-Atlantic way.
