MeTube? Produsage

It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." - Charles Darwin
http://www.brighthub.com/office/collaboration/articles/71425.aspx

Produsage is not a word according to my WORD program. It is spelt wrong. It is two words combined into the one. Producer and usage. The producer is also the user and then someone else can use the material again and produce something again. The first thing about user controlled and edited content that I thought of was wikipedia. U can look up just about any topic you can imagine on wikipedia and you will get thousands of people collaborating together to provide the rest of the world with information that they believe is correct. http://www.wikipedia.org/. When you search for wikipedia on a Google search the subtitle of the page defines wikipedia as “The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. I am in two minds about this. Obviously, with anyone being able to add or remove content, the information provided on wikipedia may or may not be correct. This is the reason why we don’t use wikipedia to gather top references for university assignments. Technically anyone who can get onto their website can delete and add information to it. This is a type of collaboration.
          I found the above quote from Charles Darwin to lend weight to my opinion on collaboration. Those who learn to collaborate are using many people’s intelligences to come up with one answer. This is why businesses use collaborative sessions when they need to generate ideas, because “Two heads are better than one”. I think most things in life could benefit from using collaboration, including online.
          uTube, people upload content on the website daily and entertain millions of people around the world. I engage in this type of media on a weekly basis at least. Another type of produsage that came to mind for me was actually university assignments. Even for the particular unit we are now studying ‘Social Media’, where we had to make a poster. This is essentially what produsage is. We are taking content, be it pictures or written information, and making it into something else. We had to showcase as much information in a visual way as we could. Did the poster benefit from many different people collaborating on the same project? Absolutely! I have no doubt that if we had not had the few people all consolidating resources and knowledge together to create one new project, we would not have produced a product that was anywhere near as successful.
          Produsage is the way of the future I believe, in business and in life. Families must work together to keep a successful balance of work and play, businesses need new ideas and ask many people to brainstorm ideas. Even companies introduce competitions to the public for ideas such as LAY’S chips offering a customer 1 million dollars or 1 percent of the flavor’s sales for one year for a new flavor concept. The slogan for this competition is “Do us a Flavor?” Catchy huh? I think it’s a great idea to see what customers want, and then these customers will get behind the product. I think we will see more of produsage as the years go on, trying to develop new and interesting ideas with the help of many people, from many different knowledge structures.

Bruns, A 2007, Produsage: towards a broader framework for user-led content creation in Creativity and cognition: proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & Cognition, viewed on 30 January 2013.