Understanding User Generated Content

Mattie Alston at DNA takes a step back to look at the User Generated Content phenomenon and tries to identify the forces and features that are driving the trend:

Creative people these days essentially fall into two groups. On the one hand are the people who create things from nothing, like the singer-songwriter who picks up his guitar and plays a tune. And on the other are the people who use pre-existing materials and rework them into something new, like the DJ who samples part of a record to form the core of a new song. In musical terms, this second approach is traditionally known as remixing. More recently, a new style of remixing has emerged, where instead of repurposing just part of a tune for use in a greater composition, two or more complete tunes are melded together. This new discipline is known as the art of the mash-up. In Web 2.0, the principles of both remixing and mash-ups are applied to content and applications on the web.

DNA Blog: Remixing & mash-ups