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Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 and Chuq Von Rospach of Chuqui 3.0 spend a lot of time and effort trying to deny the fact that there exists a potential (and for that matter reality) for significant amounts of User Generated Content, or UGC. In a way, they are correct. The amount of pre-produced professional grade content we consume has probably only marginally increased, as has the production.

The train of thought and grand take-a-way of the two editorials is that we need to get out of this mode of thinking that if “we build it, they will come” and create content. It isn’t, they argue, just that people are too busy to create content, its that they have no inclination to create content, nor the ability. There are only a finite amount of folks with talent, and while the technologies may enable those folks to be found easier, in no way should we think there is value lurking in the average internet user.

In essence, odds are you (yes, you there reading this), are useful primarily as a media consumer, and we should all deal with it and move on.

Chuq points to the 1% rule, best aggregated by Ben McConnell at the Church of the Customer Blog. He references several studies of communities like Yahoo, and Wiki projects by Comscore and others that essentially show that only 1% of a community typically contributes content to that community, the rest simply acting as consumers.

This metric holds true only when you consider the entrenched images of what we’ve traditionally considered content. If you look to examples like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Twitter, that 1% rule is completely shattered completely. If you remove the pre-conceived notions of what we’ve always considered content in the past, and look at the utility of data being generated by these systems of people, we discover that there is value in the average user.

How is this possible? What am I talking about? Let’s break it down with Twitter and Facebook, to start with. Twitter, in the sense of the content the system produces, is a pool of largely unorganized and non sequitur thoughts emitted effortlessly from the teaming masses. When one begins to start to classify and group the data based on geo-data or meme-tracking, though, utility begins to emerge. Primary sources’ first hand accounts of important events, folks to meet with in your area, and those with which you can do business. Likewise, with Facebook, there are tens of thousands of ways to interpret, use, and re-distribute the data entered into your profiles and related data fields into useful and entertaining ways - and 100% of the active userbase is involved in the content creation process.

Of course, without several next-generation AI and content processing algorithms, we won’t automatically see something as polished as a Wall Street Journal feature article or an HBO-produced special coming out of a set of Twitters or Facebook profiles, but the value is there - and it is generated by the users, refined by computers. The point remains, though, that UGC is here.

What makes the value (entertainment and business) of these tools exist? Several things: deviation from the norm (or the fad factor), the unique, timely, and utility of the content, and the fact that the content creation is seamless and effortless for those making it.

Yes, I’m talking about the value of 2.0. My misgivings of Facebook being a huge time-sink aside, when you look at how the data is created (often as effortlessly as viewing the data), you have to sit back and wonder at it a bit. The aggregation and re-application of the data generally takes place behind the scenes, and through the course of using these utilities, valuable content emerges.

So, given this revelation, what are we faced with? Instead of mourning the “myth of UGC”, instead in designing and upgrading new content systems, look for ways to make the introduction of the user generated portions to be as effortless as utilizing the data. Look for ways to improve and make more efficient the users time, not something so cool that the new system will be worth the time-sink you hope it to become. Think Twitter and Utterz, not World of Warcraft and MySpace.

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