User-Generated Content... Travel Blogs

Today's musings are about user-generated content, which arises in two NYT articles in the last few days:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/travel/travel-blogging-today-its-complicated.html?hpw

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/technology/pc-industry-fights-to-adapt-as-tablets-muscle-in.html?hpw

The first article is about travel bloggers who get their trips paid for by local tourism boards or other interested parties. In other words, the idea of the eccentric lone traveler with a backpack and an uplink is naive, with travel blogs increasingly resembling advertisements. As reported, "In March, the Federal Trade Commission had seen enough digital content that blurred the line between editorial and advertising that it issued a clarification document stating that disclosures of free trips need to be clear, concise and toward the top of posts". It's reminiscent of the issue of keyword ads versus organic search results.

The question facing readers is how to discern reliable content from content whose objectivity may be compromised by the writer's sources of funding. This is also an interesting research question, within the broader category of how people judge information quality. The article suggests a variety of clues that readers may use, such as the out-links from the blog. One imagines that readers may look for cues such as the number of followers that a blogger has, leading to a rich-get-richer effect of popularity. I personally am researching rich-get-richer effects, which I think are a big story in our Web-based information world.

The other article is about the seemingly unrelated topic of Wintel-and-PCs versus Android-Ipad-and-Tablets. It quotes  Daniel Huttenlocher of Cornell University’s new New York City technology campus, who associates PC's with the function of generating content, and tablets with the function of consuming content. He notes that "There are way more consumers than producers, period, even in a world with lots of user-generated content,” much to the chagrin of Wintel.

The IS literature, including the literature on end-user computing, has instruments that distinguish and separately measure information quality from functional effectiveness, but I think the distinction between generating and consuming content may be useful in models of adoption, usage, satisfaction, etc.

So, putting the two together: User-generated content is a big story for Web 2.0 and on. For IS research, the associated business models raise questions about how users figure out what information is objective. And there may be some importance in refining our models to distinguish explicitly between usage for content-generation and usage for content-consumption.