What Tools Exist for User Published Content?

wbav asks: "Recently there's been a trend to user published content. A couple of examples of this trend include Wikis, Podcasting, Blogs, and the resulting RSS Feeds. Last night I was asked if any other similar technologies exist. As I did not have a good response, that is my question to the slashdot community. Are there any other similar technologies which deal with user publishing that I have not mentioned?"

What about eBooks?

[joelsanda]

All of your solutions are about publishing on the web, with the possible exception of podcasting, which you could argue is mp3 player-based. What about ebooks? There are several available for most major PDA platforms, some that WYSIWYG based and others that import from ASCII or HTML.

New User-Publishing Agent

[mattdev121]

There's a new technology I heard about at a conference that's about to unfold some time late next year.
I think it's being released with the codename "BBS", maybe some of you have heard of it before?

Seriously?

[JVert]

P2P.

But this whole topic seems soo stupid.

Re:Time to drag out this old chestnut:

[some guy I know]

"It has become appallingly obvious that our blabology has exceeded our technology."

- Albert Einstein, circa 1827.

1827?
In 1827, Einstein wasn't even a sparkle in his grandad's sgukarkle (with apologies to Ice-Burg or whatever that guy's name is with the big pants, you know, the one who says "can't touch this shnizzle in my fizzle" or something?).
I think that you may have meant 1927.

Look to games

[MachDelta]

There's a ton of "user published content" action in the field of PC gaming. Pick just about any recent PC title on the planet, and chances are very good that someone has hacked/modified it and released their findings. Tons of companies nowadays (esp. developers of FPS games) wholeheartedly encourage modding games, releasing docs, developer tools, providing support, and even holding prize contests [unrealtournament.com] to encourage the practice.

Why? Because everyone wins. Its a symbiotic relationship. Mods provide extra content for an already published title, increasing its popularity, longevity, and sales (Half-Life 1, anyone?). The community feeds itself as well as the existing game. And the cherry on top is that plenty of dev studios are recruiting the cream of the mod-scene crop to bolster their own ranks. End result is better games for everyone. :)

Mostly everything.

[SharpFang]

There's very few web features that aren't available as a way of delivering user content.
WWW - everyone can have a webpage.
FTP, all of the P2P - everyone can host files they have made themselves.
Forums, BBS, Message Boards, Mailing Lists - based on user content.
IRC, chats - nothing more pathetic than a dead chat without users.
Banner ads - all the "banner exchange" style stuff brings it into users' hands.
Blogs - user-content journalism.
eBay - user-content e-commerce.
Development sites like SourceForge - user-content software development ;)
del.icio.us - hell if I know what it is, but it's all user-content.

Think of mostly any service or feature of the online world and you'll find user-content counterpart easily. I'd be hard-pressed to find domains without user-content. Ones I could think of... reserved for corporate customers - say, "Microsoft Channel Bar", mostly dead by now, or Windows Update... no, nope. The user-content counterpart for this is called malware.

Digg

[booch]

I think Digg is probably a better example than Del.icio.us, because it's a bit more "content-ful".

This whole phenomenon is a part of "the read-write web" and "social software".

graffiti

[DrSkwid]

http://www.graffiti.org/uk/index.html [graffiti.org]

one dat Negroponte might let them have his cheap PDA, until then it's spray paint

IP TV?

[wayne606]

Are "ordinary people" creating video content yet? Or are production and bandwidth issues still too challenging?

The thing about all the technologies you mentioned is that they're all slight tweaks of stuff that's been around for 10 years (web sites, mp3 files) and who knows why that specific tweak was all it took for the technology to take off in some new direction? I guess there's a certain "friction" value that you need to get below for something to reach critical mass.

The problem with asking the question "what's the next big thing" in any field (such as home-grown content creation and distribution technology) is that the answer is usually "something nobody has thought of before now"...

Re:IP TV?

[oneiros27]

Yes. It's an offset of podcasting, commonly referred to as 'videocasting' or 'video podcast'.

iTunes already supports it. [arstechnica.com] (well, it's just using RSS to link to video files, not audio files, which was all podcasting really was)

There are rumors that here may be updates to the iPod to allow it to play video, although I'd suspect at a major hit to battery life.
(and well, more cycles on the batteries -> faster battery failure, which wouldn't be a good thing)

Re:IP TV?

[wayne606]

But is there a lot of demand for video content? There are a lot more cases when you're mobile and can listen to audio (driving, jogging) than when you can watch video (taking the bus, flying). And it's a lot harder to create and distribute video content than audio.

Maybe this is a case of taking the current state of affairs and linearly extrapolating the technology, when in fact we need to look for unexpected right angles ... (whatever that means)

Re:IP TV?

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Well, there is a whole lot of demand for a certain kind of video content. The upside is you don't have to spend much on costumes locations. Probs may be a little expensive.

Re:IP TV?

[wayne606]

But how many intrepid homebrew types are going to make their own do-it-yourself porn and distribute it as video podcasts for free, and who's going to watch it on their ipods or cellphones when they're away from home? I guess we could expect longer lines for airplane bathrooms...

What type of publishing?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you mean purely online, you missed photo streams [flickr.com] (aka: blogging with pictures), video blogging [wikipedia.org] and game publishing [manifestogames.com] - not to mention the completely obvious (and so last-decade) free web sites [geocities.com]. For simply distributing content, there's always BitTorrent and - my favorite underexploited - "magnet://" style links which can point to content on Peer 2 Peer networks.

On the live front, there's also the whole webcam [wikipedia.org] thing which gave rise to the camwhore [thebestpag...iverse.net] movement. Shoutcast [wikipedia.org] type things for "internet broadcasting" y

This has got to be the most inane topic I have see

[DigitalReverend]

It's amazing, grandma johnson down the street can design her own webpages and yet this question gets deemed worthy enough for ask slashdot, where as a question I have asked a couple times about a way to tie SSHD into an sql database for user authentication for a running a "shell" instead of having to give 10,000 people user accounts on a machine gets constantly rejected.

It used to be that one would read slashdot for iformation from highly intelligent peers, anymore tho it feel like I should be taking off

Re:This has got to be the most inane topic I have

[CornerScribe]

It used to be that one would read slashdot for iformation from highly intelligent peers, anymore tho it feel like I should be taking off my shoes and socks as if I am going for a drive through Alabama instead.
I really have to take exception. Your comment is no more acceptable than any other prejudicial remark.

Lulu

[emaveneau]

I'm surprised more people aren't mentioning lulu [lulu.com]. You upload, they sell & distribute. Damn simple way to get all the "long tail" content out there.

Here [dontshoott...engers.com] is a typical example of the content I'm talking about. It's a great film but the distribution is so far out of the scope of the creator that it just isn't worth investing in a personalized eStore, advertising etc.

K5?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Last night I was asked if there was ever anything worth reading at Slashdot anymore. As I did not have a good response, I said maybe check out K5 instead...

Mediawiki

[seifried]

While not directly a content management system (or rather it is a CMS, but aimed heavily at the Encyclopedia market) it does very well as a CMS for pretty much any application. I use mediawiki to handle about ... well let's ask my Mediawiki:

http://www.seifried.org/security/index.php/Special :Statistics [seifried.org]

"There are 13,208 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about Seifried Security Site, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as content pages. E

Usenet news posting

[objekt]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet [wikipedia.org]

Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users, sometimes called Usenetters, read and post email-like messages (called "articles") to a number of distributed newsgroups, categories that resemble bulletin board systems in most respects. The medium is sustained among a large number of servers, which store and f

The read/write web

[Nick of NSTime]

I jumped on the read/write web "phenonemon" with my site, Now Spinning [nowspinning.com]. I think that user-published content is great, but as in the case of my own site, I prefer situations where content is being submitted by users *and* the "editors." Kind of like a newspaper made almost entirely of the editorial page.

To answer the poster's question, I have no idea. I use GeekLog [geeklog.com], and I like it.

diarist.com

[SpaceKow]

There is http://diarist.com/ [diarist.com] - free blog service and
http://drupal.org/ [drupal.org] - open source blog/cms tool