With my recent time off, I've had the time to think and write/blog which has been sort of a guilty pleasure since I'm not really being compensated for my "work" and it's not contributing to what I'd consider productive activities like mowing the lawn or paying my bills.
As such, I've begun to wonder how the recent explosion in user generated content (i.e. high flying startups like MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Yelp) have given rise to real businesses. Real in the sense that that large corporations are willing to pay large dollars for it. But behind these businesses are the millions of folks pouring their sweat into creating this unique content.
So....
Will the consumer always be a free, willing, and abiding source of content?
Will there be a point in time when the collective force and motivation of individuals to contribute breaks down? When it becomes more difficult to scale ...
A likely response to this is for businesses to create a menu of incentives for individuals to 'play' on their network; this could be monetary (e.g. share in ad revenue) or intangible (e.g. favored/star status amongst users). So far, most of this has come in the form of self-aggrandizement but I suspect the monetary component is not too far off.
Something to think about as these businesses compete for a finite amount of resources, their "workers" time.
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