In February of 2004, in the PEW internet and american life project issued a report titled Content Creation Online (PDF), reporting that 44% of all Internet users (about 53 million people) have contributed their thoughts and their files to the online world. It’s a good read and somewhat predictive of a rapidly increasing trend. At the time they highlighted the following categories:

• Websites
• Webcams
• Weblogs/Blogs
• Newsgroups

Aside from these categories, recently we have seen the rapid proliferation of:

• Photo sharing sites (Flickr, Buzznet, Textamerica, and an oldster Webshots)
• Social bookmarking sites (e.g. Del.icio.us)
• Podcasting (e.g. IT conversations)
• VLogging (Video Blogging)

John Markoff writes about this increasing trend in the NY Times today. In the story he highlights the efforts of Yahoo to capitalize on this trend, along with Technorati and others. Specifically he talks about the value of what’s commonly referred to as Tagging, which can lead to a Folksonomy.

I’m finding that the web is best organized from the bottom up, meaning prescribing some kind of ontology is not as efficient as reporting around the way individual publishers organize their posts or blogs. At Technorati we direct our visitors to our tags section as a feature of our keyword search results. Generally speaking most people don’t see a stark difference between a tag and a keyword result. Although we believe that when we successfully match a tag to a given keyword result that the tag result may have a higher signal to noise ratio, is a better match, than the keyword results alone. I’ve experienced this with our service, although it’s not a perfect implementation, it’s getting better all the time. The corpus of tags we have identified is enormous, over a million unique terms at this point. This is essentially a dictionary being born.

There is a great graphic at the Times showing how user generated content is cycled through Yahoo’s MyWeb service, although it has general application to how user generated content cycles.

Of course Google could be doing a lot with this information too, although they seem to be a little opaque at this time. Markoff mentions that at the new Google Earth service users can annotate views of the data. I’m sure there is more coming…

With access to this rapidly evolving data set, Technorati aims to create many interesting views into this corpus. Recently we have leveraged this data into a service that is tracking the developing dialog around the Live 8 concerts and the G8 Summits. People are using tags to opt in to this service and we are displaying this output on the web at live8.technorati.com.

Looking forward to passing our Technorati lens over all this user generated content, in increasingly more useful ways… Got ideas? Let’s hear them…