Last week I sat on an interesting panel at the Wharton Technology Conference in Philadelphia with Ralph Folz of Molecular, Dan Burkhart from eBay, and Damon Cronkey from Yahoo! CorpDev. The panel was titled Amateur Content but quickly evolved into a discussion on business models, metadata, and user experience. Damon made some great points with respect to the proliferation of technologies and the need for user simplicity, citing the Pipes property at Yahoo! and its simple design. He also asserted that on a mobile device, getting to the right result must be push as opposed to click navigation (which is what FAST has been saying for a while).

I was asked a question by our very capable moderator – Robin Murdoch at Accenture – regarding what UGC means to me. I tried to broaden the definition of what UGC constitutes, pushing the discussion beyond YouTube to consider metadata as another valuable type of UGC. The panel universally heralded metadata as the key and cited a number of examples of monetizing metadata including “people who bought x also bought y” as well as automatically collecting and displaying what products influencers, community-members, and other gardeners are buying/seeing/suggesting. Robin asked the panel if the concentration of links emanating from GYMA was forcing sites to scramble and rethink business models. I jumped in and refuted this trend, citing Sue Feldman’s recent work at IDC, which states that a large percentage of links to destination sites are not coming from GYMA but are indeed coming from “vertical” portal sites or elsewhere. I was impressed by Dan’s humility to acknowledge that eBay had been a “front door” site but was now looking at enhancing its presence on the periphery or at the destination sites, consistent with this trend. But the coolest moment might have been when Robin asked us what we thought of Viacom’s standing up to Google/YouTube and demanding cessation of distribution of its proprietary content. Looking perplexed, I asked the crowd, “I don’t understand why it just can’t be free?” Applause broke out in the back of the room as this was after all a conference where a large percentage of attendees were students.