Difference between revisions of "Weblog/PotentialPosts/Users"

Just Say No! ...to calling people users.

We are certainly not the first to publicly ask this question. But why do so many sites call their contributors users? User are passive. Users are not contributors, they are passive. The title does little to convey the sense of ownership that the creators of today's community-curated online works feel.

We were ecstatic we found Brianna Laugher's efforts at exploring pieces of the problem. Ted Ernst then opined about it on the AboutUs Weblog back in August.

This rejection of "users" definitely seems to have struck a cord with many folks. Brianna followed up with Community-curated works (CCW), Josh Bancroft joined the fray with I Hate the Term “User Generated Content”. How About “Community-Curated Works” Instead? and this month, David Pogue of the New York Times recently lambasted it in his list of Tech Terms to Avoid. He was quick to point out that the only other industry than tech to call people users is the drug trade.

Now, the choice of label for online citizens was a haphazard one. Like so much else of Internet culture, it seems to have bubbled up in to general usage from within the backend of the tech world, engineers and developers. While "user" is a rather functional and appropriate word in that context, it is hardly applicable to the participatory world of Web 2.0

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.

In the spirit of the Typo Eradication Advancement League which I found through New York Post: Weird But True (and the article was deleted at Wikipedia for not being notable.) and Learning By Doing: 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.

LinkLanguage is important to me. It is hard that my own company still uses the User Namespace like Wikipedia and not like wikiHow, which has it but hides it.