Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com ]

11/02/08 Replace Walls With Windows…

SINGAPORE - I was writing a piece today on walls vs windows in terms of user generated content (UGC) centric sites. By this I mean closed content behind a walled garden where a user account is required to view as opposed to where you can view without registering. Here’s an excerpt…

I believe closed gardens do not work. Eventually all walls will be knocked down, unless potentially they have windows in them. As a user I will not throw my hard worked content into a black hole of a proprietary network. It adds value to the owner of the network, not me. The last thing I want is to spend time writing great content and have it restricted to only the community - as a user I do not care if my colleagues have accounts or not. If I want to publish, I will do it to the widest audience possible.

Users need the option to publish to the public. It must be index-able by search engines and allowed be read by anyone. It can only do good, there is no counter-argument to that. Content feeds for subscription must be externally facing, if users already have a work-flow using a 3rd party feed reader you cannot require users to change their habits just for your network, hit & miss amateur content just won’t be important enough for them to do this multiple times a day. Nothing is gained by hiding content from non-account holders.

The value is not in the reading of material… the value is in joining in with the conversation, connecting to these people and discovering their content (of course, you cannot do this unless you’re an account holder).

-Robin.

(Image Credit: 1/ A guard-dog at the door does not attract new users. 2/ No windows in these floating houses. Taken on the Mekong Delta, Vietnam on Friday morning - by Author.)

Tags: beoing open, open, openess, walled garden, walls, windows

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