Social media and user-generated content

Marko Turpeinen

marko.turpeinen@hiit.fiHelsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT)

turpeinen@kth.seKungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH)

• why social media?

• personal / group / community media

• mobile media

• social networking sites

• social gaming and community content

Themes

• Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) Computer Science, M.Sc. (1995), Ph.D. (2000)

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Arts and Sciences, M. Sc. (2000)

• Alma Media Corp. (1996 - 2005)

• Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) Principal Scientist, Network Society Programme (2005 - ) Group Founder & Leader, Digital Content Communities (2002 - )

• Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH) Professor, Media Technology (2006 - )

My Background

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT)

Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan(KTH)

Observe Communicate Create Share

Citizens,markets> 5000

Colleagues, communities

50-5000

Family,friends,groups

2-50

Individual

Activities and Relationship Table(Shneiderman, 2003)

Neuman: The Future of Mass Audience

The Media Gap(Tomita, 1980)

Print TV

Net

EmotionalExperience

EntertainmentEscapism

RationalEveryday life management SecurityWell-beingIndividual control

Social Rich communication

One-to-one/one-to-many Tribalism

reader

watcher

listener

user

consumer

storyteller

player

participant

developer

producer

Horowitz Pyramid(Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo!, 2006)

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

with Futurice

User-centric mobile phone photo sharing system.

Metadata-centric mobile phone photo system.

A more commercially oriented version of

MobShare.

A full-blown commercial service with MTV3.

Measuring the

social in media

Not public

nor private

New business

in hybrid

media

services

• More than half of online teens in US are Content Creators

• 19% of online teens keep a blog and 38% read them

• Older girls lead the blogging activity among teens

• Teen bloggers are tech-savvy and heavy internet users.

• Half of online teens say they currently download music files and close to one-third say they download video

• Teens are as likely not to have paid for music online as they are to have tried peer-to-peer

Source: Lenhart A. and Madden M. Teen content creators and consumers: Pew Internet & American Life Project

Teen Content Creators and Consumers

Selling social networks

• customized advertising (Myspace & Google)

• partnerships (Facebook & Apple iTunes)

• product affinity groups (Levi’s is my “friend”)

• membership fees (vip accounts, more features)

• virtual goods (trading, gifts, identity, new features)

The “open APIs” and/or “open source” approach are producing high quality media content with booming enthusiasm, as demonstrated by blogs, wikis, RSS, music, game modding, etc.

Open content

• collaborative media creation

• people build on each other’s creative work

• collective authorship

• new forms of licensing

Creative Communities

Creative Commons

Source: Thomke & von Hippel, 2002

Customers-as-Innovators

CUSTOM GRAPHICS

CUSTOMAUDIO

CUSTOM CODE

TOTAL CONVERSIONS

(= ”MODS”)

MODDINGTOOLS

OTHER FANPRODUCTION

(walkthroughs,screenshots,

gameplay videos,fan fiction, etc.)

USER-CREATED GAME CONTENT

”Modding Scenes”Tero Laukkanen, HyperMediaLab,

University of Tampere (2004)

Game-related fan production

• RPG that is specifically designed to be extensible by the gamers

• Aurora toolkit shipped with the game

• supportive of the user community

• more than 2,500 extensions available

Neverwinter Nights (Bioware)

• “All user created variations must only work with the full

commercial version of NWN”.

• “User extensions must not contain any libelous, defamatory,

pornographic, obscene, or other illegal material, material that

is scandalous or invades the rights of privacy or publicity of

any third party, or contain any trademarks, copyright-protected

work or other property of third parties, or contain any

viruses, worms, or other malicious code”.

• “Users may not rent, sell, lease, lend, offer on a pay-per-play

or timesharing basis or otherwise commercially exploit or

commercially distribute extensions; including, without

limitation, hosting pay-per-play servers, hosting pay-per-

download web-sites for variations including sites that charge

for bandwidth use, and independently selling variations online,

at retail, mail order, etc”.

• “If you Distribute, or permit others to Distribute, your

Variations, you hereby grant back to Infogrames and BioWare and

irrevocable royalty-free right to use and distribute such

Variations by any means, and to make such modifications thereto

as Infogrames and/or BioWare deem are necessary to package,

combine, and otherwise distribute such Variations.”

NWN EULA

Half Life 2 - Comics

Machinima

Using 3D computer games to make movies

Second Life - February 2006

Second Life - February 2007

Digital Content Communities Research Group (HIIT)

http://pong.hiit.fi/dcc/

More information/demos/code