I’ve learnt a huge amount from the iX Conferences that I’ve attended. Firstly, it’s the Academic Conference held at SMU which is free of charge for students. Next up, it’s the iX Congress which I had the fantastic opportunity to both attend and speak at.

Over time, I would probably share more and more of the knowledge that I’ve gained here but here are 2 most important lessons that I’ve learnt which I’ll translate to you, from my own perspective.

Flickr and User Generated Content

Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! gave a insightful presentation about the acquisition and further development of Flickr. More importantly, he talked about the phenomenon of User Generated Content.

User Generated Content is probably as old as the Internet itself, but it was elevated (or, deprecated, depending on your point of view) to buzzword status with the prominence of Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia. Afterall, wasn’t the BBS and Usenet filled with User Generated Content?

What Flickr and YouTube did right was giving users means to easily upload content into a space that was easy and pleasant to use. With that, there was a torrent of Content flooding it, which immediately created the next Problem which turned out to be an Opportunity.

Organising Content

Horowitz then brought the audience back to the days when the Internet was at its infancy, during the days when Yahoo! was starting out. Webpages were organised into categories and sub-categories, a method that was tedious for the maintainers of the service, but wildly effective.

But the web grew too big and such a method, instinctively, would be too tedious. A search method is needed, but search results were too off tangent most of the time. It wasn’t until Google’s Pagerank when search results were truly relevant.

Flickr faced the same problem, but probably more difficult. There’s no way, at least no accurate and fast means, for an indexing service to organise videos. It’s then clear that the only way is through Tagging and passsing the work back to users.

But would users do the work?

It turns out that users would, even love to, tag their own content, provided that the system is simple and enjoyable to use. There is no content management system as complex and as effect as the human mind. It seems to be the Occam’s Razor to a very complex problem and one that is startlingly effective.

Of course, if you look at it from a System Designer’s point of view, it’s a dream come true, to be accurate, their Wildest Dream Come True.

Give users the facilities and they create, share, upload, organise, rate, review and comment on all Content. It’s almost like an Autonomous Content Generating Machine. What could be better?

We now all know that Flickr and YouTube are sitting atop gold mines. If, somehow, they manage to put advertisements that are acceptable by the users, it will prove to lucrative.

And, guess who’s doing all the work? You.

== To be continued ==