“User-Generated Content” is an irreparably ugly and broken phrase. First, we’re people, not “users”. Second, people write and speak and design and compose and sing and play and build and earn and pay; machines “generate”. Third, it’s words and pictures and sound and money, not “content”.

2007 and the “next” big media thing is an article of mine that’s published in this week’s New Statesman – or, rather, in the free supplement to their New Media Awards that accompanies it. Fortunately, the article is also available for free online.

In the article, I consider (given the title of the awards) that whenever you call something “new”, you imply something else to be “old”, and that lots of people get hung up on this rather than simply considering what happens “next”. You can read the article to find out where I go with it.

A lot of the impetus for this piece came out of Reboot 8, so it was good to channel that somewhere, and you may also recognise some of the other concepts “linked” to in the piece. It was also interesting in that I set out to write a piece about “online”, and ended up writing a pretty straight “media” piece – something I’ve never tried before. I also cut a section about Web 2.0, because it didn’t quite hang right – but there’s certainly something to be said about that nomenclature also creating issues where there were none. Perhaps there’s a space to write that somewhere else – it’s still hanging around my head.

Anyhow, nice to be in print again, and to be given the chance to think about ideas like these around the web, publishing, and innovation.