Last Blogger

There was a moderately interesting post/troll over at webmasterworld a couple of days ago. The initial post was questioning how fair it is that people are becoming millionaires and billionaires off of other people’s work. While that sounds like a fairly trollish post, it has actually initiated a pretty interesting discussion.

It’s a very interesting topic because many of the larger companies involved in Web 2.0 technologies are making their money off of user generated content. That’s one of the fundamental definitions of Web 2.0. But the responses show a clear sentiment that I share.

The thing is that every successful company that makes use of user generated content needs to give something back of value to the users. In Google’s case, that’s tons of traffic and in myspace’s case that’s opportunity for friends to connect and bands to break out. If these companies didn’t give something back, people would opt out and they would fizzle out.

The point is that there’s opportunity for end users in all of these programs. If you’re not getting what you want out of a program, get out. That includes search engines. You can easily exclude yourself from search engines. A properly configured robots.txt file will get you out of there in no time. If you just feel like you’re not getting enough out of it, go read up on what others are doing.

Any successful user contributed content website has to give at least as much back to its users as it takes. If you feel like you’re getting taken advantage of, you might be missing some information so go read up.