Dave Naffziger's Blog

Rahul has written several great posts over the past few weeks that do a great job reflecting some of the obvious & non-obvious learnings that we’ve picked up at Judy’s Book. Here are a few of my favorites:

On incremental development (OK, not related to UGC, but still a good post):

Incremental development also lets you change course earlier if you’re wrong. You never really know if it’s going to work unless you put it out there and see. Anything that lets you get to that point in less time is the right way forward in my book.

On aggregation & UGC:

* Create a data asset by content aggregation first - value for initial users, SEO-worthy pages
* Create lightweight ways fo users to add unique content around your data asset

On compensating users:

People are quick to optimize against whatever model you put in place and if you’re not careful about measuring and adapting your system, you’ll quickly find yourself paying for contributions that don’t create any value.

On user governance systems:

One thing is clear though - if you’re in the user generated content business, finding a governance system that will let you maintain the quality and tone of data you want in a scalable fashion will be a competitive advantage. Presenting new users with information they find valuable earlier in their interaction cycle makes them that much more likely to stick around, participate and contribute their own $0.02.

This last post is a gem and should be read end-to-end (actually, they all should be).