right, but first of all, online community (aka "user-generated content") is very 1.0. indeed, it's more like 0.1 -- if you go back to BBSs, usenet, etc., which were (and still are? [1]) entirely "user-generated" content. the web built itself on top of that as much as on darpanet and bitnet. my point is that online publishers in the late 90s were already relying heavily on user-generated content. the 2.0 aspect of it (if there really is such a thing, and maybe there is) is what i think you wind up talking about later: the shared protocols/platforms made possible by the adoption of open and/or common platforms and open APIs, probably together with folksonomical tagging (i'm winging it here) the likes of which you see most prominently on del.icio.us and technorati, which then make possible exactly the hooking up of content (broadly construed) from across sites or service providers (and so, if i'm more or less right, this is one of things precisely *not* 2.0about, e.g., Facebook), making it easy to see everybody's stuff no matter where it "lives." in the days when i was doing editing/writing/online community management at IntellectualCapital.com, we had to do all this *manually.* if there's a difference now, it's that there are easy ways to tie everyone to everything. and then you're pretty much down to advertising revenue, and your roundup of that makes sense to me.
Hence, when I went surfing for something a couple of weeks ago, I ended up
> at a lot of sites where people were talking about what I was interested
> in.
> Clicking the links meant I viewed their pages, which jacks their hits,
> which gives them numbers to show the advertisers, which gives them data
> for
> their media kits which will, they hope, increase revenue.
>
> Social networking sites are only another way to generate user content.
> e.g., Flickr. You get users to upload photos for the sheer joy of it, then
> users come in to upload photos for the job networking possibilities, then
> they come in for the possibility of selling photos, blah blah. Meanwhile,
> google ads out the hoo ha for the cameras, equipment, film, etc. that's
> being discussed in comments. Since advertising online is all a numbers
> game, the goal is to get as many visitors as possible to increase hits on
> the ads.
>
> The thing with this approach is that it just doesn't matter what the
> qulity
> of that content is. As long as the right keywords are being dropped, it
> doesn't matter if anything productive or useful is actually going on.
maybe nothing productive or useful has to go on. and i suspect a fair bit does, in spite of the sytem neither requiring nor encouraging it. but that's just a guess.
[1] although surely a lot of usenet and BBS traffic is now simply filesharing, don't i remember rightly that slash fiction was pretty much born on the usenets? and we're back to pr0n.
j