In a short interview on CNET News, marking the second anniversary of Yahoo!'s acquisition of Flickr (is it only two years?), Caterina Fake talks about attention economies, the internet "culture of generosity" and the creating of online communities ('It really is kind of like building a civilization. You need to have a culture and mores and a sense of this is "what people do here." If people greet each other and are helpful, and stomp on trolls immediately and keep the trash in the trash cans, that becomes what the culture of the place is. And that scales.'), and then the interview winds up with this:
Jeremy Neumann (from the audience) asks, "At South by Southwest Bruce Sterling was very down on blogs, podcasting, videos and other participatory media, comparing it to folk art which he said was really, really bad. Is it the taking part and the sharing that counts or are we raising the bar with user-generated content?"
Fake: It used to be when you wanted to hear music, you didn't go turn on the radio and listen to Christina Aguilera. You went down to the living room and grabbed cousin Joe and played the banjo.
There's nobody trying to be The Rolling Stones down there, or even Whitesnake. The "audience" for this stuff is usually friends, family, people like that. It's not meant to be judged by, ahem, Whitesnake standards. So I'd have to disagree with Bruce Sterling there. On the other hand, there are gems in all those family snapshots and MP3s of people noodling in their basements. And social networks are great ways of surfacing those really amazing things.
Interestingness on Flickr is a great way to do that. It looks at all the human activity around a photo and determines which ones are the most interesting.
Scepticism about the value of the write part of the read/write web is persistent amongst those not yet using the web to write. No surprise there (but how quickly we can forget this)! I'm not sure how convincing they'd find it, but this interview does offer another accessible piece to which I can point them.
There's no substitute for participation, though — for reading and writing online.
