Difference between revisions of "Weblog/PotentialPosts/Users"

What legitimate industry calls people Users?

I am sure I am not the first to ask this question publicly. In fact a friend of mine, a graduate of the School of Information at the University of Michigan brought this phrase up to me when I was complaining / showing off the excellent article by Brianna Laugher a few months ago. Ted Ernst posted about it on the AboutUs Weblog

This question of what to call User Generated Content has been twhirling around in my head ever sense.

I was ecstatic when I found Brianna's efforts at exploring peices of the problem as I understand it: An alternative term for "User-generated content"

She followed up with Community-curated works (CCW)

Josh Bancroft [I Hate the Term “User Generated Content”. How About “Community-Curated Works” Instead?

I think that the main problem, which when solved, fixes the whole thing. David Pogue recently lambasted the term in his list of Tech Terms to Avoid.

It is hard to imagine for most tech people to think that user is anything but a good term - it is for whom they do their work for. This industry grew up around these engineers - they drove it, so obviously it is their legacy language that still is common, but that doesn't mean it is a good thing.

There are smart people out there User Centered Strategy being one of them - saying and posting with clearly opposing understandings of the issue.

The subject gets some meta talk on Metafilter: Users are people too about changing it on their site.

I made several edits to Vidoop.com's about us page, as if it where a wiki (wouldn't it be great if the whole web was a wiki... wait, that is what we are doing here at AboutUs!) and changed the way their page would read if they removed the "User" language - here is the change and here is the diff. (looks like the page changed a bit, but the writing is similar)

A challenge to, my own company AboutUs.org, Metafilter, Vidoop - really any other Portland based technology company - let's start the language / people revolution here.