Ottawa, ON

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at 2:00 p.m.

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MR. OXLEY: ...geographic social separation.

The people who work for me all work the same way, much the same way. Young people just don't accept that the way we did things 10 years ago is the way we have to. Like my daughter ...

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She doesn't know what life was like before that.

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MR. OXLEY: Thank you ...

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MR. LEBLANC: ... user-created content: What are the impacts?

Mike...?

MR. LEBLANC: ... by 600 per cent, and the initiative was so successful that they cut 11,000 salaries of engineers affected to Client Services because the clients serviced themselves through the forum. So already in '95 this was the birth of what we could call now user-generated content.

Another question that people might ask is: What is the actual influence of the bloggers?

Let me ask you what would be the most influential factor in the purchase decision of a washing machine. Will this be the publicity of the manufacturer? Will this be the journalist that talks about washing machines? Or will this be your brother-in-law that purchased a washing machine?

Well, bloggers and the blogger community is a world-wide network of brothers-in-law. This is why people give so much credit to bloggers, because they can relate to them and they can really understand the concern and what they are seeing.

Now, another thing that is very strange is that at the last provincial election in the Province of Québec there was several parties that had blogs, but the party that won the blog war was a party that had no blog itself. It was Action démocratique du Québec. But they had a lot of users that blogged for them on their own blogs.

All the points and all the political ideas of Action démocratique du Québec were the next day in the newspaper, because journalists read the blogs, read the blogs of the followers of Action démocratique du Québec. So there again is another user impact that finally helped that party that became known in Québec.

Another thing that we have to think about when we think about user-created impact is the effect of that on companies.

I give a lot of lectures and training to companies about their use of blog and blogging and the first question any company always comes up with is: Well, if we open a blog, if we open a forum, people might criticize us. People might start to say they don't like our product or our services and we cannot bear the idea of having such criticism. What can we do?

Now, if you have a bad product and you have a bad service, my point of view is you had better know it. Instead of paying for a focus group you could have it live. Somebody will tell you live "Your product is not that good. You should increase it."

Last year there was a new concept that a lot of people talked about and it was transparency tyranny. I believe we are at that age that every company should be transparent and should be able to live by its product and services and listen to what it has to improve.

Now obviously those types of things are very hard and could be very hurtful for your ego to know that your product is not was good as you are led to believe, but what is the other thing? If you don't leave a space within your company presence, how could it hurt you if somebody bitched about your product elsewhere?

I did it myself. I have a blog at Michelleblanc.com. It is a blog that I'm lucky enough to have something like 80,000 unique viewers a month -- and I blog in French.

One of the companies that I will not name, I purchased my furniture, my business furniture from them. I had very, very, very bad service, a hell of an experience. I phoned them, I said how bad the experience was. They gave me the runaround. I went to their Web site, I tried to find a place where I could put my brief and state how bad my experience was. I couldn't find any place, so I wrote a post saying how shitty their service was.

Now if you go on Google and you write the name of that company, on the first page of Google you see "Michel Leblanc, M.Sc. commerce électronique XXX "quelle service de merde!"

So if they had a space within their Web site that allowed me to tell them how shitty their service was, that comment would have been melted in the overwhelming information that the site provided. But now, since it did not allow me to express my disappointment, I expressed it anyway and it hurts them much more now.

What really surprised me is that two years down the road they never phoned me to tell me "What happened? Can we do something to solve the problem? How can we get rid of that page?" They did not phone me yet, so it is really surprising.

Another thing I want to tell you before I let our distinguished panel discuss further the importance and impact of user-generated content, a year and a half ago you know the blog marketing iSpeak about another blogger's content, another blogger's content, a blogger speaks about my content?

So there was a guy that linked to my content for a couple of times. I went back, I looked at his blog, found it was a very interesting blog, gave him a call and I said "Why don't you take a coffee and discuss business and blogging." We had a lot of fun. We discussed for something like three hours.

Then I said "Why don't we do that as a monthly event and invite other people to join in?" So he wrote a post, I wrote a post. The next time we were 20 people coming from business or the blogging community.

Now that event, that cost nothing to me and that only cost the drink of the people that come to the meeting, they pay themselves a drink, it is now in four countries. It is spreading like wildfire. I never put marketing money on it. For me it's just for the fun of discussing with business people and with bloggers about business blogging.

The event is called Yulbiz. Now you have one in Montréal, you have one in Québec City, you have one in Paris, you have one in Brussels and you have one in Warsaw. We are discussing starting a Yulbiz event in Strasbourg, in Lille, in New York and in San Francisco.

All this did not exist a year and a half ago and now, because of Yulbiz -- one of the three major media corporations in Canada is called Transcontinental. At Yulbiz the idea started to start making publicity for business bloggers. So during one of the Yulbiz events we discussed that possibility.

Transcontinental came with the idea of making -- I don't know the word in English, but it's like a publicity Yul staff. Transcontinental will sell the publicity, the publicity will be on business blog and will directly target business readers which read blogs.

Now, for the last two weeks, the 20 most prominent business bloggers in Québec have a little publicity, which pays a hell of a lot more than global accents. We are all very happy about that. The first one that advertised there is Musée des beaux arts de Montréal, which is a great idea, and it's like a test.

So now business bloggers will be able, on top of attracting customers, of making money with their content, and making very good money. And Transcontinental will give 55 per cent of the publicity it sells to the bloggers and keep 45 per cent to themselves.

To me it's a very great idea and now in Canada business bloggers can start to make money with their content and advertisers can now pinpoint business people that are interested in the content of business bloggers.

So again, it is a very good user-created impact and now that this was organically organized through blogs.

So I thank you very much and I would like to present to you Mr. Jungwook Lim who is the Vice-President of Scientific Innovation at Daum Communications, Korea. For those who don't know about Daum Communications, it's like the equivalent of Yahoo! here.

Thank you.

--- Applause

MR. LIM: Thank you, Monsieur, for the nice introduction.

Let me give you some characteristics of a Korean UCC and the Korean market.

This is the history of a Korean UCC. This is the timeline over Korean Internet industry. We actually started the same as other countries. Like, Internet error just started from 1995, but I think there are two distinctions compared to other countries. The one is some kind of -- only spread over broadband Internet.

There are some reasons. Broadband Internet started from 1998, and it started heavily, you know, provided from the 1990s, because of some huge industry competition and the government support and some kind of dense population, because of Seoul, you know, has about one-third of the population in Korea.

So, actually, broadband Internet start to be a key driver for UCC, something like that. So after, dot-com collapsed from 2000, even though we have a lot of some interesting -- you know, some Internet new services, like -- so from the time, people started using Avatar, and with Avatar people expressed themselves in the cyberspace after that, from 2003.

And even before the Web 2.0, and Korea started from something like Web 2.0 service, like, I'm going to give you some examples, like, enable analogy in is a Q and A community service, and the other one such as for story is the Cyworld.

Cyworld is a social networking service started from 1999, and it really took off from 2003. And the Cyworld is like from 2003 and 2004 and all of a sudden in Korea, in twenties and teenagers, just everybody's using the Cyworld and the network and they started express themselves in the cyberspace.

So I think there are some kind of key drivers, and I think the important technological driver is the digital devices. Korea is famous for one of the -- you know, some early market, early adapt to market for some digital devices, like digital camera, personal multimedia player and cellphone.

From only 21st century, these cameras is having a huge market share in the Korean market and personal multimedia player has been, you know, sold very vastly. The cellphone, I think from 2000, almost every cellphone has camera capabilities, and with that people starting to upload their photos to the Internet, and I think that's the start of UCC.

So let me give you two interesting examples about UCC. The first one, in my company's case, is the down blogger news. It's something like helping the bloggers. Anybody's whose familiar with journalism probably knows about the OMI New. OMI News is famous for the (inaudible) journalism, so it's the down blog and uses one of the odd bands to form over (inaudible) journalism.

Anybody who has their blog in Korea can register their blogs to the down blogger news system, so now the number of down blogger journalists registered is about 35,000 right now. They actually posted articles, about 38,000 in a month. Of course, there are a lot of something, they are worthless articles, but there are many, many, and good articles and there's some interesting life stories, and something like that.

So we are actually the editors of the down news system and they are helping with the down editors, you know, some peoples, and they are pick, you know, down interesting articles. And it actually appears the down front page. Down front page has about, you know, some 7 million visitors every day, and it has, you know, some huge power in Korean society.

And this the banking hours of the globe is one example. Recently, Korean Banking Union, they are opposed to cutting the working hours of the bank and they are trying to compare it to the other countries. They are arguing that the other countries' bank, their working hour is short, and so Koreans have to, you know, some cutting the working hours of bank.

So one down blogger, actually, Korean blogger, trying to, you know, some analyze this, and he wrote articles about this and they are asking for sending some comments about other countries', you know, situation. So this Korean blogger collected the comments from the other Koreans living around the world on the working hours and services, over 25 different countries.

Actually, after that, he wrote an article based on the information, proving that the demands of the Korean Banking Union were unreasonable. Actually, they are based on the fact -- on wrong facts. So eventually Korean Banking Union that took the proposal for the time being due to criticism raised by the blogger news. So this is, I think, the good example for how UCC, you know, influence, you know, some society.

And a second one is (inaudible). This is one of the very successful -- you know, some business cases also, and this is one of the first polar-based -- this is the first polar base to question and answer community in Korea, and maybe in the world.

This is capable of giving very specific answers to the various questions. So if you have any some kinds of questions about Ottawa and what to do after this conference, you can just ask him a question in the system and somebody who has that information answers the Internet. And you can easily search that same kind of questions. So it's very easy to find some kind of specific answer.

And they actually started the system from 2002, and actually it became strong actually over competitors like Google. So it's like extracting analysis from users' brains, so it has been very successful. It's like copied by the Yahoo! answer, something like that.

So this is one of the two examples of UCC impact on Korean society. And these days, resumes in the forms of UCC are increasing because companies there, who values the creativity more, they are trying to analyze, you know, some applicants' UCC, like a video or blog and something like that, and read it, and they are trying to decide who's, you know, appropriate for their companies.

Korean UCC also have challenges, like copyright issue in appropriated contents, and so we have a video service and we have a very -- too many, you know, some videos posted every day, but the problem is that a lot of them actually copyright infringement, you know, videos, actually.

So we spend a lot of time, actually, filtering this, and so making system for providing some video filtering system, cue out filtering and provide some human monitoring teams. And we are talking about the government a lot, about making the policies and guideline about this.

Thank you.

--- Applause

MR. LEBLANC: Now we will listen to Mr. Andres Monroy-Hernandez, from Lego and Lifelong Kindergarten Initiative at MIT.

MR. MONROY-HERNANDEZ: Hello. I am part of a group at the MIT Media Lab called Lifelong Kindergarten Group and we are interested in technology and education, and how these two areas can converse. As this panel is about how the user united content and Web 2.0 technologies can have an impact in society, I think the kind of work that we are doing in our group is very relevant.

One of the things that we often think about when we think about education is an image like this, where we have a professor or a teacher basically giving data or knowledge to students, the students memorize it, and then you take a test and then that's the end of the process, basically. If you fail, then you have to relearn everything.

However, we all know that this is one of the simplest and not-so-useful ways of learning. Unfortunately, when we think about technology and education, we often think of just perpetrating this model with new technologies. So when we think about, like, how the web can help kids learn, we just think about maybe Wikipedia is a good way for them to get information or just access to information over the web or videos, or interactive content. But we don’t really think about how technology can really change these models, because just delivering information with the web is just perpetrating the same model and replacing the teacher for a computer, which is basically the same thing.

So, when we look at inspiration, we look at places like the kindergarten and we often criticize how bad educations are in different countries and everybody says, like middle school is really bad, elementary school is really bad, but we often don’t hear people criticize kindergarten, and we believe that’s because it works and because at that age people are really learning a lot of different things in a very short period of time. Perhaps it’s not the most advanced things because we are really young, but people explore, the kids explore by playing with Playdough, Lego blocks, or fingerpaint, and as they do that, as they explore their world and play with different things they learn a lot of different concepts like numbers, the concept of time and so on.

But,(inaudible) one of the things that happens) after kindergarten is that it seems that we never have (inaudible) and that’s where we think technology makes a big difference. We will keep the same learning style throughout all the (inaudible) called the Scratch.

Scratch is a (inaudible) language. This is an (inaudible) of the application that allows anyone to be able to program animations, interactive art, video games, anything that you want to created in the ether world, you can create with Scratch.

So these applications, it’s, I could show it to you if I had my computer here, but basically what you do is that you drag blocks from that panel into these panels in the middle, and then can control different things to happen on the screen. So, for example, I can say every time I clap I want a character to be jumping, or when I, say, move my mouse, I want my image to be changing. So, this application was developed as part of a research project of four years where we tested these in different countries with different kids.

One of the things I recently did is that I thought about the idea of, okay, it’s fine, people can create this kind of interactive content. We give people the tools for them to create things, not just consume. But, it is important for them to share. As we have heard here in the conference like the idea of sharing on-line and this, this whole concept, is a very important concept also in education. You don’t just create things alone, you also have to share them with others.

So, as part of my thesis project I kind of focus on these particular portions of the application, which is the share button. This is a very simple button but what it does is that in addition to it allows you to save on your computer or to share with others on your desktop, you can also share it with other people on-line. So, I created a website similar to U-Tube and all these different websites, Flicker and so on, I created a website where kids can upload their creations made in Scratch and share them with the world.

The site was released about four months ago. We have received tons of projects like this one, for example. This is one of the most advanced projects, it’s a video game that some kid from -- I think this kid was from the UK. So, there are different types of animations and video games that people have created, and we have received about 33,000 projects from all over the world, and we have been really surprised because originally this was just my thesis project but it has grown a lot in the past few months, and now we are thinking of better ways of fostering this idea of collaboration.

One of the different things that I believe Scratch presents compared to other on-line media sharing applications is that in a lot of applications you basically go to a community to get inspirational ideas or also to put content out there, so I created a video, I put it on U-Tube and then people can see my video and get inspiration to create another video, and perhaps like a lip-sync video and so it’s like a cycle there.

One of the things that is really hard to do in places like U-Tube or other places like that, is to creatively appropriate or download content and re-mix it to create new content. So that’s something that in Scratch is very simple to do.

In Scratch when you are looking at a project like this one, you can see that you can download the original source code of any project that you see on the website and then build on top of it. So, about 15% of the projects right now, on our site, are re-mixes of other people’s content, which we have been really surprised about and we think this has a lot of promises allowed for the future.

One of the things that we are doing, also, is, that all the content that kids share on-line is shared under the Creative Common Licence attribution and Share Alike type of license. So, you are allowed to do anything you want with content that is uploaded there as long as you share it in the same way. So, we are trying to foster this idea of collaboration and also giving credit to others.

Going back to what kind of statistics we have gotten in the past four months. We have gotten about six million page views, about 900,000 visits, people from all different countries, and 33,000 projects.

One of the interesting things is that about 20% of the registered users are active content creators of projects and more than that are people who are actually posting comments and giving feedback to other kids, creating content on the site.

If we analyse how much code has been created on the site, there are about 500,000 scripts created. So each project is composed of different scripts and there’s lots of code on the website.

There is also this idea of creating a network of friends in the website, so we have friendship connections there.

So, the type of changes that people have done is about 44% of the changes are scripts changes and code changes, which are to the core of what you can actually change on a project.

The distribution of ages on the site right now, the peak is at twelve, but you can see that the youngest generation from eight to around sixteen, which is our target audience, is really the people who are using the website.

Finally, the distribution across gender is not as good as we wished, and this is something that we are working on. Right now, the distribution is like this, but we are hoping to do more changes into the wrapping or the application to promote more participation across gender.

One of the things that I have done is analyse how people correlate gender and number of projects. And one of the things that I found is that there is no correlation between gender and age and number of projects, which means that girls and boys are as likely to work on projects as each other.

And, finally, these are the kind of projects that people have created. There are different trends on the site. People are citing other people’s work, and acknowledging that other people are reaching(inaudible) their content. People are creating content based on what you see on TV, like Deal or No Deal, that kind of application, or also the Transformers or the theme songs, or Hot Reporter.

Finally, people are reaching out to other communities. They are creating their blogs about what they are doing on Scratch. They created Facebook groups, etcetera.

So, I hope you get to visit our site. If you google Scratch on Google you’ll find our website and our software. Thank you.

--- Applause

MR. LEBLANC: Thank you Mr. Monroy-Hernandez.

Now, please listen to Mrs. Jennifer Corriero, who is the Executive Director and Co-founder of TakingITGlobal.

MS CORRIERO: All right, well, I wanted to start off with a question for you. If you can just think about a young person that you know, or know of, between the ages of about fifteen and twenty-five, and if you can think of an example of how they would have demonstrated leadership, or a contribution that they have made to the world in some way, whether it be to your own life or to the community or their school, but think about a positive contribution.

I’ll give you ten seconds.

And, if you can turn to your neighbour and just quickly share that example. And I know a lot of you are distancing yourselves from each others, so network, and you have about thirty second each just to share that example. Please go ahead.

You guys are very quiet.

Okay. And are there any of you that are willing to share with the group? Please? Yes? And actually there’s three of you, you guys can just go up to the mic so everyone can hear, and for the translation. Up to three or four can just go ahead to the microphones. I see three, so that’s good.

Okay, so we’ll start with you. And just say your name.

QUESTION: My name is Stephen. I have a cousin, she lives in South Africa and she’s helping bridge communities through the wine culture and sharing expertise through Rhine in a non-profit way.

MS CORRIERO: Okay, thank you.

QUESTION: And she’s twenty-four.

MS CORRIERO: Twenty-four. Great. Okay, over there in the back?

QUESTION: I have a 16 year old daughter who organized a fashion show at her school to raise funds for helpless Huti, specially geared towards AIDS orphans.

MS CORRIERO: Wow, that's great. Thank you.

QUESTION: Hi. My name is Bernard Marcou(ph). The guy I know, which is quite extraordinary, is Emera Kevin(ph) lives in Switzerland, he is 18 years old, he has been a long-time Web site designer, is ranked actually an expert in voice over IP. That's not extraordinary.

What is, is that he is actually completely blind. Quite extraordinary. Emera Kevin.

MS CORRIERO: Thank you.

And I was asked to share an example and I will share an example of someone who I know from New Zealand. Her name is Cherie(ph) and in high school she started a club called The Tech Angels and they became the mentors to help implement the use of laptops in their school. She was the head tech angel.

There are countless examples of the contribution I think that all people are making in this question around, you know, what are the impacts of user-created content.

For me what that speaks to is the ability to contribute. My frame of reference is really around the massive potential that exists for young people in particular to contribute to society and how that age where you are in transition from being a kid, you are in a stage of adolescence and you are moving into adulthood, you are developing your own sense of identity and place in the world.

That is such a critical time, a critical stage in one's life to really nurture a sense of creativity, a sense of social responsibility, a sense of place, a sense of community, to be having a sense of inquiry about the world, curiosity for all of these attributes that really help to foster active citizens who can really contribute to shaping society over the long haul.

I think a lot of young people today, there are arguments about whether or not there is enough cultivation of these attributes.

We were talking just before about kindergarten and how we need to go back to that sort of environment where people are really nurtured. I think that those are important values for us to think about and how are we nurturing the youth of our society and how do we continue to have effective mechanisms because there will always be generations of youth.

Now I don't identify as a youth so I consider myself youthful and I think many in the room might also consider themselves to be youthful. I think it is really critical to make sure that there are effective bridges across generations and that we can create avenues for young people to really participate.

So this is the motivation behind my life and my work with taking it global.

We actually created back in 2000 an online community called "TakingITGglobal.org, which is essentially based around the idea of user-generated content with a focus on social responsibility and international development issues, looking at issues around poverty and issues around peace and conflict, culture and identity, environmental issues, and we are trying to actually create an environment for young people to recognize their ability to have a voice and their ability to contribute and to have that contribution be valued and appreciated.

So the site is in 12 languages, all of them translation has been done by our own community, and we have reached -- well, on a monthly basis we reach about a million unique users, though as registered members there are 160,000 that have registered and there is about a million hits that the site received on a daily basis.

The average length per visit on the site is about 30 minutes and only about 10 per cent of the total members have actually contributed the content of the site, so I guess it still does fall within the dichotomy of a lot of people may be registering and being consumers of the information and maybe sharing it with others, but not necessarily all contributing actively to all the content.

I just wanted to give you a sense of some of the features.

The "Make Connection" section is really around the profiles and how people connect to each other. We have discussion forums and blogs. The quote from one of our members:

"Take provides me with the opportunity to interact with others who have similar ideas and interests." (As read)

And really that commonality is around the desire for young people to make a difference. We are not excluding anyone by age, it's just focused on youth.

We have active discussion forums that have a whole range of facilitators, and what has really been interesting is how our policies on the discussion forums and the guidelines for moderation have evolved over the years and how -- we are looking at the impact of policy more broadly here today and I guess one of the questions that we face as a Canadian-based charity that has a very global audience.

I didn't mention, but only 30 per cent of our members are in North America. The next highest region is actually in Africa. The second highest language of our site is Arabic. So you really see a blend of different cultures, values, norms, expectations. So when we are creating guidelines obviously we are going to be compliant with the Canadian law, because that is what we are governed by, but how do we also look at policies that should exist within our site to sort of govern the activity that takes place.

One of our goals as well is to be very classroom-friendly and so how do we ensure that there is sort of the level of appropriateness of content so that we are not banned in schools, which we are not, though we are actually in Alabama.

Sorry, I had to mention that. We are not banned in other countries, but anyway.

The "Take Action" section is really trying to cultivate the -- well, our motto is "Inspire, Inform and Involve". So how do we actually move from the desire to do something to actually cultivating a sense of initiative?

We have a guide to action that can be downloaded and various projects that people post on the site. We have databases of organization, and we map those organizations. Using Google maps for example you can actually spot where they are and sort of zoom in, sort of align the data that we have with other ways to sort of visualize that information.

We also have calendars of events and financial opportunities and scholarships that are all posted on the site.

"Express Yourself", which is my personal favourite section where we have an online global gallery, people are submitting images, they are submitting artwork, and we have allowed the ability for people to integrate content on our site posted from other sites. For example, on your personal profile you can feed in your Facebook profile link or your Flickr photos if you are uploading it elsewhere.

Understanding the issues is really providing that background. We have worked with different groups from many UN agencies like the Millennium Campaign to actually have a whole awareness initiative around the millennium development goals on our site. We have distributed thousands of campaign kits to our members who have run many activities in their communities.

The country sites is a way for people to explore the world and there is also two million city sites that are generated. All the content is very much database-driven so you can access information in so many different ways, by issue, by language, by country.