User Generated Content

Estratto da F. Chrisam, Le licenze sugli user-generated content. Click-wrap agreement, big data e circolazione online del diritto d’autore, Aracne, 2016, 125-153. La ricerca ha ad oggetto i rapporti contrattuali tra provider e user nel contesto del cosiddetto «web 2.0»: tale espressione viene comunemente utilizzata per descrivere il passaggio dall’originaria dimensione statica del web ad una dinamico-partecipativa in cui gli utenti delle reti internet non sono più meri fruitori passivi di contenuti digitali bensì autori; spesso infatti sono oggetto di upload dati che soddisfano il requisito costitutivo del carattere creativo e risultano pertanto protetti dal diritto d’autore. E’ per tale ragione che i contratti di erogazione dei servizi online prevedono tipicamente clausole con cui l’utente concede al provider una licenza sugli user-generated content: i servizi in esame implicano infatti operazioni che si sostanziano in atti di riproduzione, modificazione e comunicazione al pubblico dei contenuti immessi dagli utenti e che costituirebbero pertanto contraffazione in assenza di autorizzazione da parte del titolare dei diritti. Meno evidente è la ragione che sottende l’adozione di licenze talmente ampie da costituire in taluni casi vere e proprie previsioni in bianco: la giustificazione che viene comunemente proposta ruota attorno alla complessità dei servizi erogati online e alla necessità di un livello sufficiente di flessibilità in ragione dell’avanzamento tecnologico continuo che caratterizza l’ambiente digitale; tuttavia questa tesi non convince pienamente poiché il medesimo risultato potrebbe essere agevolmente ottenuto anche in presenza di previsioni maggiormente determinate nel loro contenuto e vincolate espressamente alla fornitura di specifici servizi o categorie di servizi in luogo del mero richiamo nominale della piattaforma. La tendenza sembra piuttosto quella di attribuire al provider una licenza in bianco sui contenuti immessi dall’utente tale da consentirne il più ampio riutilizzo per finalità che vengono definite di volta in volta unilateralmente dall’intermediario medesimo attraverso la modifica dell’architettura della piattaforma online.
Occorre allora chiedersi quale sia il ruolo effettivamente giocato da tali licenze nell’economia dei contratti di erogazione dei servizi online e se sia possibile individuarne dei limiti al di là del mero dato testuale.
Il settimo capitolo tenta di sciogliere i nodi relativi ai limiti delle licenze ricostruendo il contratto alla luce della funzione economica unitariamente perseguita dalle parti; ma il ricorso ai soli criteri ermeneutici generali non consente di individuare una soluzione univoca lasciando il dubbio tra due schemi possibili: (i) quello per cui la licenza sugli user-generated content si inserirebbe nell’economia di uno scambio tra servizi e pubblicità mirata; (ii) quello per cui tale licenza costituirebbe di per sé la controprestazione dell’utente a fronte della fornitura solo apparentemente gratuita dei servizi.
Si procede allora alla lettura congiunta dei canoni generali di interpretazione del contratto e delle previsioni specificamente dettate dalla disciplina autorale: l’accento viene posto in particolare sul ruolo giocato dalla Zweckübertragungstheorie di cui si offre una rilettura critica alla luce del nuovo contesto della contrattazione di massa online.

Through a combination of political economy and radical mediation theory, this dissertation argues that current ‘YouTube Stars’ can be understood as a particularly virulent strain of ‘homo æconomicus’, who are produced and commodified through the techno-capitalist structures of the platform. YouTube culture has transformed since its inception in 2005 to increasingly become a conduit for commercial interests, and successful vloggers are nodes in this capitalist flow: absorbing, transforming and spreading the neoliberal political rationality of the platform. I analyse how mainstream vloggers are emerging through and are entangled with the neoliberal rationality of the complex commercial interests, structures and technological affordances of the platform. I conclude by considering the ethical ramifications of, and possible solutions to, the commodification of the self on YouTube vlogs.

Rather than a document that is constantly being written as in the wiki approach, the Living Document (LD) is a document that also acts as a document router, operating by means of structured and organized social tagging and using existing ontologies. It offers an environment where users can manage papers and related information, share their knowledge with their peers and discover hidden associations among the shared knowledge. The LD builds upon both the Semantic Web, which values the integration of well-structured data, and the Social Web, which aims to facilitate interaction amongst people by means of user-generated content. In this vein, the LD is similar to a social networking system, with users as central nodes in the network, with the difference that interaction is focused on papers rather than people. Papers, with their ability to represent research interests, expertise, affiliations, and links to web based tools and databanks, are the central axis for interaction amongst user...

This paper makes three contributions: first, we suggest a clear, concise definition of Web 2.0, something that has eluded other authors, including the Tim O’Reilly the originator of the concept. Second, prior work has focused largely on the implications of Web 2.0 for producers of content, usually corporations or government agencies. This paper is one of the few analyses of Web 2.0 from the point of view of users. Third, we characterize the creative activity of Web 2.0 users. In addition to their active content production, they are unusually active users of the Internet for enter- tainment. In multivariate models predicting Web 2.0, the most consistently impor- tant variables are technical ability, comfort revealing personal data and, particularly, Web 2.0 confidence. These variables suggest that despite the apparent simplicity of FaceBook or of typing a book review on Amazon, ability remains very important in the eyes of users. For many, there appears to be something daunting about...

The paper deals with evaluation of the quality of public service infrastructure in the city of Kronstadt, the historical part of Saint-Petersburg agglomeration. Public services are considered as FMCG, cultural and recreational venues people use in everyday life. We consider the quality of public services through a set of objective (availability, accessibility, variability) and subjective (users perception) indicators. We measure the quality of public service infrastructure based on the data from open digital sources, such as Technical Passports of Houses from Open Data of Saint-Petersburg Platform, Google Maps, Google Places, and validate usability of services based on a sociological survey. We illustrate our analysis with maps which provide a detailed view on the localization, accessibility, variability of the service infrastructure. We conclude that public service infrastructure in Kronstadt does not address the needs of the dormitory areas which make up one third of all citizens of the city.

Over the past two decades with the rise of digital media, newspapers across Western democracies have been increasingly adopting new forms of online participatory journalism. During this time, 'below the line' comment spaces have grown to be one of the most popular forms of user-generated content. Comment spaces are thought to perform a multitude of functions. However, much has been made about their potential as spaces for public debate that could act as a new form of the public sphere where journalists can hear from, and directly engage with, their readers. Survey and interview research has suggested that some journalists do read, and sometimes engage in, comment sections. However, no study has systematically analysed how journalists actually engage in comment spaces; what factors shape such engagement; and how this has evolved over time. In this chapter, we begin to fill in these gaps by investigating how Guardian journalists behave below the line. Our research, which draws upon a multi-method approach and longitudinal research dataset, included a manual content analysis of all comments made (2006-17) by 26 journalists (n= 5448) and 18 semi-structured interviews conducted in two phases (13 in 2012 and 5 repeated in 2017-18). Our chapter sheds light on how journalists behave below the line and what this might mean for journalism practice in the digital age.

The uncontrolled dissemination of User-Generated Content (UGC) through social media and video platforms raises increasing concerns about the intentional or unintentional spread of misleading information. As a result, people who are turning to the Internet for their daily news, need tools that help them distinguish between reliable and unreliable content. Here we present the Context Aggregation and Analysis tool, with the aim to facilitate the investigation of the veracity of User-Generated videos (UGVs). The tool collects and calculates a set of verification cues based on the video context, that is the information surrounding the video rather than the video itself, and then creates a verification report. The cues include information about the video and user that posted it, as well as the activity of other users surrounding it (what we call “wisdom of the crowd”), cross-checking with previous cases of fakes (“wisdom of the past”), and employing machine learning systems trained on pas...

Digitalization enables the development of existing social activities and the invention of new forms of social activities online. Social networks and microblogging are some of the most frequently used online social interaction services, and Twitter combines them. These channels handle intensive communication embodying persuasion in one way or the other. This paper studies the nature of Twitter to uncover inherent persuasion patterns that change users’ behavior, or attitude, or both. An online survey of Twitter users in Latvia was carried out between July 19 and July 28, 2010, receiving 403 valid responses for further statistical data analysis. Recent frameworks for designing persuasive systems and measuring the success of persuasive technology applications were applied during an evaluation of the results. The main results from this study relate to incremental behavior and attitude change among Twitter users. Other results extend understanding of habits and behaviors of Twitter users in general, and therefore may be used for further studies of the persuasiveness of Twitter.

The advent of Web 2.0 and its collaborative tools (forums, chat, blogs, wikis) simplified the interaction among various business subjects (company, customers, suppliers). A new model of Enterprise 2.0 communicates interactively with all stakeholders, cooperate with them, listen, create, share and capitalize knowledge. Web 2.0 enhances customer relationships and supports, fully, developments in the field of marketing: from advertisement to participation, from social networking to mobile communication. In this paper we talk about Marketing 2.0 that with interactive web 2.0 tools facilitates the relationships between enterprise and customer. The enterprise communicate with customer, by a bidirectional channel, during pre and post purchase. The customer affections sentimentally and emotionally to brand and company. The enterprise can know, in real-time, reviews of customers on product/service and the degree of satisfaction and behaves accordingly. Marketing 2.0 leds companies to reach business goals using technological tools and social media that exploit, in the interactive dialogue, the old power of word of mouth.

This article investigates the existence of different kinds of User
Generated Content (UGC) and the connection between UGC and some narrative structures of the media product itself. The corpus of the analysis is constituted by videogames and the UGC related to them, in particular Halo and Metroid series and illustrates how small differences in, for instance, character presentation may influence both player’s understanding of the character itself and the kind of production is mainly created in the subject.‎

Uvjerenje da su nove tehnologije omogućile personalizaciju javnog medijskog prostora kreirajući okruženje u kojem je funkcija društvenih medija samopromocija korisnika putem komunikacije sistema vrijednosti – osnovni je stav od kojeg polazi ovo istraživanje, uz pretpostavke da su društveni mediji percipirani kao personalni mediji, a da se sistem vrijednosti korisnika društvenih medija manifestuje putem kreiranog virtuelnog identiteta. Ključna riječ koja proizlazi iz ovako definisanog uvjerenja ujedno određuje i paradigmu djelovanja novih medija, kao i upravljačkih, kreativnih ili produkcionih kapaciteta koje nameću karakteristike društvenih medija: personalizacija javnog medijskog prostora i alati medijske produkcije koji su dostupni svakom pojedincu uslovili su i zaokret koji se desio na terenu profesionalnog menadžmenta medija i produkcije medijskog sadržaja.

This essay focus on User Generated Content and Web 2.0 technologies in digital public history projects. A new frontier in public history practices and how to govern shared authority in the web is at stake. In the digital realm, public historians’ professional methods and codes are rewritten and reinterpreted and, because of new digital technologies, new practices have to be mastered to adapt to social media. International examples of digital projects with Big Data’s’ and crowdsourcing activities are showcased. Two different social media, Twitter and HistoryPin are inquired because of the use of documents (mainly photographs) and of specific techniques that activate the past into the present (“presentism”) in digital public history projects about WW1.

Come migliorare la gestione dei corsi di lingua on line e su app? Il volume risponde a questo interrogativo individuando strategie glottodidattiche, indicando in che modo veicolare gli aspetti culturali della lingua e come gestire la videoscrittura in modo inclusivo. Inoltre, fornisce istruzioni per scegliere un corso a distanza, valutandone potenzialità e criticità.

Il testo è indicato sia per la formazione sia per l’aggiornamento dei docenti di didattica della lingua (seconda e straniera) ma anche di altre discipline, dei tutor e degli instructional designer, prendendo in considerazione le nuove competenze richieste ai docenti e i differenti metodi di studio e stili di apprendimento delle nuove generazioni.

Il taglio pratico – che si avvale anche di memorandum visivi e brevi test di autovalutazione – è pensato per accrescere l’abilità di gestire con più consapevolezza critica e controllo il processo di insegnamento a distanza. Infine, viene stilato un Mini Vademecum che riassume le risposte alle domande poste nel volume e che, nella sua brevità, può essere recuperato mentalmente senza sforzo come guida durante l’attività di insegnamento.

ABSTRACT A growing body of literature frames Last Chance Tourism as a key motivation for tourists visiting glaciers. Much of the discourse considers the contradiction of tourists contributing to the degradation of what they recognise to be a threatened attraction. Due to the significant acceleration of glacial retreat, glaciers and glacier tourism are a key focus. This paper explores the extent to which the “Last Chance” lexicon extends to the tourists’ vocabulary when reflecting on their visits to Sólheimajökull Glacier and three glaciers distributed across the two hemispheres, through an analysis of 2004 TripAdvisor User Generated Content (UGC) reviews written between 2017 and 2019. The reviews reveal that a quarter of tourists are explicitly engaging in the “Last Chance” discourse. Topics of tourist satisfaction, access to the glacier, weather and guided tours are more common. For those who do mention the “Last Chance” aspect, commentary on the aesthetics of the glacier, a recognition of the impact of climate change, and warnings to future travelers are captured with no clear indication of experiences leading to an ambassadorship. The tourists engage in a vicious cycle enhancing the retreat of glaciers by viewing them. Understanding these perspectives is critical in managing these destinations sustainably.

Destination image is compilation of ideas, beliefs and impressions based on information processing from a variety of sources over time. There is competition among destinations, based on the image perceived by people about the destination. It is understood that positive image of the destination provides competitive advantage among competitors. By the year 2014, 40% of the world population has internet connection compared to 1% in 1995. Large number of studies suggests the importance and interrelation between technology and tourism. The Internet has changed the way tourists access information, plan their trips, and also the way they share their travel experiences, mostly through user-generated content. Advancement in technology enables tourists to experience and share their experience in real time by using texts, photographs, and videos etc. through internet, which further leads to formation of destination image even before visiting. On the other hand, this user-generated content creates pre-visit destination image for the person who goes through it. The onlookers

When a concept is diffusely defined or, as this article argues, “taken for granted”, it becomes very difficult to track such concept on the literature and have some continuity as researchers build on top of previous results. This article proposes a definition for User-Generated Content, a term that though has lost some saliency, stands in the center or the social media phenomenon, so it should not be disregarded as an object of study.
Celebrating 20 years of the concept, this research performs a multidisciplinary literature review of 61 academic articles on UGC. Through deconstruction of the acronym UGC, it builds on the present converging, conflicting and diverging definitions and/or approaches to User-Generated Content on an attempt to consolidate a broader definition that encompasses the complexities of the phenomenon in a context of consolidation of social media, to be applied to social sciences.
Following the present analysis, User-Generated Content is defined as any kind of text, data or action performed by online digital systems users, published and disseminated by the same user through independent channels, that incur an expressive or communicative effect either on an individual manner or combined with other contributions from the same or other sources.
This is the first academic effort that aims to create an in-depth dialogue over the different approaches to UGC across disciplines on the social sciences field. It should help reignite interest in the acronym, which got somehow eclipsed by the broader field of social media; whilst without UGC, social media would not exist or would not have the same social impact it does in its current form. Analogously, UGC as a topic of research has been deeply affected by the emergence and consolidation of Social Media. As this debate evolves, this contribution should be helpful as a reference to operationalize UGC on future research.

This book investigates how interaction design can support people’s participation in museums and exhibition venues. It does so by presenting and analysing three case studies that took place in Ateneum Art Museum, Kunsthalle (Taidehalli) and the Design Museum from 2005 to 2008.
Salgado proposed the concept of ecology of participation to better understand and make use of content creation and sharing in the museums. Participation needs to be grounded on existing resources, people and practices at the museum. The interactive pieces deployed in the museums provide an arena for exploration of different multimedia resources and creative means to connect with the material in the exhibition.
This analysis is positioned in the context of Interaction Design; however, it combines Museum Studies and Museum Informatics to provide an understanding of the problematic from the museum point of view. The work includes recommendations for museums such as collaborating with other stakeholders, promoting community-created content and trusting the community.

Due to the rapid advancement of new technologies in business, marketers’ dependency on usergenerated content (UGC) is rising. This study therefore seeks to elucidate the importance of usergenerated content in creating sales and establishing relationships with customers. Convenience non-probability sampling was adopted in selecting 330 participants. In addition, structural equation modelling was used in testing proposed hypotheses. Findings reveal that there is a positive relationship between the use of UGC, brand trust and purchase intention. However, it is observed that subjective norms, information quality and source credibility affect the use of UGC for decision making. The main recommendation is that it is imperative for marketers to be cognisant of their online audience and engage with customers online. Overall, this study will aid marketers in the comprehension of the factors associated with brand trust and purchase intention in relation to UGC advertising.

Abstract: Recent studies have called into question the credibility and relevance of travel-related user-generated content (UGC). Regardless these matters, tourists not only read and use information from the Internet during their pre-travel choice process, but also post information on the Internet during and post-travel stages. And, these contents are use and meaning to others travelers decision process, but in different degrees. So, what makes a UCG relevant and for whom? To better understand these questions, data was gathered from TripAdvisor regarding customer opinions concerning their restaurant experiences in top 10 restaurants, from two island destinations (USA versus Europe). Results validate the existence of different travelers expertise profile in what concerns UCG restaurant related. Also, the results further reinforce the literature relative to the importance online social media in the buyer decision-making process and to the restaurant experience as a whole.

The development of the so-called Web 2.0 caused a shift from a passive use of the Internet to an active role of the user that implied the transformation of the simple user in creator so that each and every user can easily be a creator. This is the reality at the origin of the diffusion of User-Generated-Content (UGC). In fact, UGC implies a massive creation of new material constantly published on the net and generally based on pre-existing material, being an adaptation or modification of the same. This paper is intended to understand why the European Union approach to the regulation of this new kind of content production is still uncertain. Firstly the background of the consultation launched by the European Union Commission will be analyzed together with the phenomenon. Then, in the second and third paragraph the rights involved and the three possible alternative solutions will be examined. Finally, the aspects that remained unheeded will be quickly reviewed. This analysis is aimed to understand such approach and the reasons why it lead to a substantial failure of the attempt to regulate an incredibly complex and massive instrument of creation (and infringement) of copyrighted material.