The Fusion of Virtual And UGC

Posted on August 8, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content, Content Co-Creation, New Tools, Advertising/Marketing |

Kaneva, or in Latin blank canvas, is another company trying to work out how to take the MySpace/Youtube consumer mentality and raise the cultural bar.

In doing so it skirts around some of the key issues in contemporary media, so let’s take a look.

Founded by Christopher C Klaus it is still in Beta. At first glance the strategy is to combine user-generated content with a virtual world, creating a social entertainment network which fuses gaming and clips.

It sounds a bit like Second Life. At least I think it will be difficult to tread a path between Second Life and YouTube or ourmedia (and quite some others) while retaining a unique identity and keeping strategy clear.

And it has little apparent niche in mind, a factor which I think will drive, for example, Viewdo, a site that uses user clips for how-to instruction, to success.

Services like Kaneva can appear to sit comfortably on the moral high ground by offering users a way to express their creativity and by extending the idea of community into the UGC space.

Companies like Blip, it seems to me, already have the moral high ground because they look for ways to drive revenue to users who provide content.

Second Life meanwhile is preparing for a Suzanne Vega debut as an avatar.

“In August 2006, Suzanne Vega will become the first major recording artist to perform live in Second Life avatar form. This forms part of a larger project sponsored by The Infinite Mind, a public radio show which has hired Infinite Vision Media to create a permanent presence in Second Life.”

Infinite Mind debuted in August, the first public radio show in cyberspace. Kurt Vonnegut has already appeared.

Advertisers can go here to find out more about promoting businesses in 3-D worlds and here for another option, oddcast’s rich media vatars.

We’re dealing here with a rush of enthusiasm for User Generated Content, the slow evolution of virtual worlds, the search for an effective business model for UGC, a way to define audiences for advertisers.

I keep coming back to Viewdo as the one site that’s going to work in the long run as an effective publishing medium and Second Life as the one site that has the innovative edge that will help it maintain momentum long after competitors have decided the search for a business model lies in less glamourous groves.

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