An interesting comment by Pete Mortensen on a post by Bruce Nussbaum about the very low number of participation on user-generated content platforms:

"tools that allow people to be designers or broadcasters have been around for years, and they have been niche. What YouTube has done is create a single repository that can find relevant video for virtually any subject you want to know about, and then provided a cross-platform, speedy solution to deliver it. The role of the people posting videos, let alone storing them, is a mechanism to this bigger goal, a place to find the videos you want when you want them. If all the clips were put up by an automated computer, most people wouldn't care.

This is the great myth of Web 2.0, that its revolution has come from people creating things. It has actually changed the Internet by putting people in control of how to measure popularity and identify your own interests. The actual content is generally from professionals. And that's a more sustainable view to take, I think. We don't become creators of entertainment, we become curators for the entertainment of ourselves and others. That's a very different kind of participation."

Why do I blog this? some quotes to be used in a presentation about web2.0, user generated content and how this can of interest to the video game industry. I may not entirely be okay with "The actual content is generally from professionals", the rest of the assertions are interesting. Reminds me of this Guardian article last year: What is the 1% rule which describes that "50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users" or that on Yahoo! Groups "1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress; 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups"

Although this hard figures are tough, it does not dismiss the "user-generated content" meme (aka craftware), the situation is just different and there are some design opportunities anyway based on these.