User Generated Content - Web 2.0

In recent PhoCusWright FYI pieces written by Cathy Schetzina, Direction of Information Services and Bob Offutt, Technology Analyst as well as an earlier piece written by John Bray, Vice President of Advisory Services, the authors describe a second generation Web 2.0 environment based on user generated content. I am in complete agreement with my colleagues at PhoCusWright on this issue and wanted point out a specific example on how user generated content can be tied to geo coding. Cathy and Bob mention Flickr tags in their article, but did not specifically highlight the Geo Coding aspect of these tags. If you go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags you can get a list of all time most popular tags. Immediately one will note the fact that top cities such as Amsterdam, Chicago and London show up on this list. Integrating this digital content, reviews from both online review sites such as Trip Advisor and IgoUgo as well as blogs, and other user generated rants and raves, highlights the need to find a way to filter this content and validate the input. Reputation systems that rate content based on the reputation created by the author is one way to sort through the ever increasing user input. Another idea is using constraint engine technology allowing the user to filter not only end user content, but all content based on a set of constraints defined by the user is another technology to consider. More on this technology in future blog entries.