Via Jeff Pulver I learn about Alx Klive, from whom in turn I learn about vcritic, an interesting experiment in editorially-driven aggregation of user-generated video. They are trying to put value into pure curated aggregation, without undertaking content distribution or creation.
In vcritic I found a very interesting post by Asi Sharabi (whose personal blog is elsewhere). They key bit:
[...] think about your de.lic.ious tag-cloud or the blogroll on the side-bar of your blog - isn't that content? Isn't organising, recommending, rating or linking etc. is in essence creating content? So we have user generated content and user organised content and user distributed content... people are content!
I broadly agree with this (although perhaps not with the concluding exclamation). From this and my own earlier posts, the following emerges:
- Aggregates are a form of content
- Aggregates can't exist without ('linear') content to link to - they are a 'higher layer' of content
- Linear content can't succeed without aggregates that promote it (for the reasons see this)
It may be that the web's main innovation is that it allows you to legally create and profit from aggregates without owning any rights to the content they rely on. To be sure there are limitations to this: you can't reproduce other people's content on your site; you can't always enframe it; and you can't always take someone's RSS feed and render it on your site; and all of this is still contested territory. But qualifications aside, the basic structure of the medium remains: anyone can link to most content, and most content owners profit from those links.
I disagree with some of Asi's other views. In an otherwise highly recommended post, he argues that "everything that has been uploaded without commercial / marketing / promotional purpose in mind is UGC. That includes clips that were on TV, movies etc and for some reason been uploaded to YouTube, like sports great moments, or a bit from Paris Hilton TV Show." This, I think, is confused: what is user-generated in that case is the uploading and the aggregating, but not the content these rely on. Owning content gives you some rights to limit what people can do with it, and allowing you to restrict who can copy 'the content itself' (whatever that means) is one of copyright law's main aims.
Finally, this reminds me of my various musings about the inadequacy of the concept of 'content'. As Lawrence Lessig poins out, the notion of "copying" is central to copyright law; and as I've argued, copyright law is constitutive of the notion of 'content'. Until recently 'content' was an unambiguous term, because being in possession of the dead matter that 'holds' it (e.g. a CD) was synonymous with being able to experience it. But no more: just think of encrypted content. Value and content (and, as a result, value and copyright law) are getting out of synch.
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