Legal aspects of user generated content

Nobody cares !!!! Well, I need to look after legal aspect of user generated content. as publisher we earn our living from the content and intellectual property is one of our assets... I've attend a Juriconnexion.fr event where that kind of topic was addressed and the conclusions of professor Manara from the Edhec Business School can highlight some issues : If your site contain offending content about yourself, you are safe :-) but otherwise you can be responsible to civil law and more... Why ?
The "blogger" or the one that allows user generated content is responsible of the content of his site, the one that provides the content has also his part of responsibility but it's theoretical since you can post anonymous comment/content. Finally, in France, the one that host the site is safe.... That why you'll find a lot of explicit content on their blogging platform ! So, as Publisher, we just need to control that the content is meeting our editorial policy but can we make a commercial product out of it ? Yes if the licence and the Terms and Conditions to post content is explicit. Having said that, who is going to generate content knowing that the site is making money out of it ? Would you ?

Mashup in a B2B world ?

Mashup application are often reduced to an enhancement of Google Map with some nice (useless?) features. Recent announcements make me think that we'll see mashup in a business context sooner than expect. SalesForce.com strategy behind their AppExchange is a good example of Mashing up application together in their environment. Read the press release that announced the SalesForce for Google Adwords to understand the business impact of Mashups. Traditional Publishers are moving to the software world to enter the Client's Value chain. More and more propose work flow applications in their portfolio (Check Wolters Kluwer's Corporate and Financial Services) that need to take Mashup into account. In the same vein, Factiva announced a mashup outside the Google sphere (that's the news!). Factiva SalesWorks locates prospect on a map (oohhh again a map :-) but this time the Microsoft Virtual Earth. Thing are definitively evolving there !

Impact of social content on traditional media

Traditional journalists must find ways to access and take the writing of bloggers into account when doing their reporting, according to Reuters Asia's managing director Alex Hungate. The growing popularity of online social networks and blogs suggests bloggers have an equally valid point of view, he said in a recent interview with Business Time Asia

Basically, A survey showed up that 51% of news readers consider watching equally blogs content that newspapper.... Reuters has invested $7 million in PLUCK's blog syndication network, a strategy to automated analysis of the blogoshpère which allow them quite easilly to assess a news in the social web to leverage its importance for their own publication.

BBC about the future of Search

A intersting conference by a project manager at the BBC. The proposed content is increasing day after day, they digitalize more and more archive but the user generated content is also booming via e-mails and mobile phones. The content in their case, is more pictures and short films than text or document but they face similar issues than publishers. They want to make their content available on new delivery channel and therefore need to tag the content (for searching or labelling) independently of the delivery channel. Eg. how to tag the content for search engine and for vodcasting ? Of course, like traditional publisher, the volume of content impact the editorial workload and this process taking ages if they want to make it internally. Therefore they allow user generated tags to reduce the production process. Smart usage of the social web. This could be applicable for legal content but probally on market segement that accepts the community to provide input on their subject.

A side effect of this social tagging, the navigation becomes more and more driven by metadata and less and less by taxonomies managed by an editorial team. Intersting...