Adam Mathes has a very good article titled Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata that discusses the strenghts and weaknesses of user generated metadata systems that are used in services like Flickr and del.icio.us. It seems pretty clear that user generated content will have a larger and larger roll to play on websites on the Internet. No one person or organization is a match for coming up with the sheer quantity of excellence in photography or comprehensive bookmarks that Flickr and del.icio.us are respectively, but with new services like those a website owner doesn’t really have to be, either.
The point is that a new model that one could use for a website is gathering and in a way ”curating” content for excellence so that readers of this site are treated only to the best of what people have submitted to the site. The bottom line is that the challenge today is just as much one of organizing information as it is creating it from scratch.
