Before taking this Journalism 2.0 course, I was not that familiar with the concept of user-generated content (UGC). After learning what it really means and how people can benefit from reading user-generated content, I realized, I actually am an active beneficent of user generated content. User-generated content is any type of content that is created by users and unpaid publishers.
That means literally any post that you read that is from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Blogs, Podcasts, comments, reviews, or discussion pages.
I realized that I am pretty dependent on user-generated content for advice or reference. I’m usually searching on Yelp for pictures of foods or reviews of restaurants to help influence my decision on my order. One way I like to reference or am influenced by user-generated content is randomly googling questions, choosing a website I think sounds trustworthy or dependable, and then read the comments. I tend to choose the Google results that are from Ask.com or YahooAnswers.com because I feel like the users on these websites are people like me: asking ordinary questions, looking for trustworthy and experienced answers.
For instance, the other day I came home from a trip really late at night, on a Sunday, so nothing was open for ordering food. I looked in the cabinets and the refrigerator, 
but I had just thrown my old groceries away because they went bad while I was traveling. So I looked in the freezer. Here I found a frozen pizza that my friend had bought the first week we got here…I know. Being as desperate as I was, I decided to just check out the expiration date and see how bad it could be. The expiration date read “September 10th” of this year. I wasn’t sure if that was really that bad or not since technically frozen pizza 
is built for keeping in the freezer for a long period of time until you finally realize you still have it months later and decide to finally eat it. Obviously the first thing I did was turn to Google. One of the first results that came up was a link to IGN.com and it started off with “How long is frozen pizza good for when…”, so I decided this guy sounded pretty similar to me inquiring about some overdue frozen pizza. It turned out to have a long timeline of back and forth comments between the asker and the commenters. It went like this:
That sold me. And the user claimed his pizza was about a year overdue, 
so I decided to gamble with the two month expired frozen pizza. After cooking it for an extra 10 minutes, to make sure it was perfectly cooked, all four of us decided to live on the edge and try the potentially food poisoning pizza. To my surprise, I thought it was really good. I couldn’t taste that it was old and it didn’t taste stale or bad to me, so I kept eating it. I even agree with the asker on IGN.com that aging a pizza “like fine wine” may start being the move these days.
At the end of the night, I was really happy that I trusted this user and the comments posted on his question about expired pizza because I fulfilled my hunger and it didn’t take much effort at all (I also didn’t get sick, so he was right).
User-generated content, I believe is extremely helpful because you usually receive feedback from experienced users or someone who knows exactly what you are talking about. These users and their comments are a sufficient way to get the gist of something and are an easy and free way to find reviews on a topic of interest.
Journalism 2.0 in Barcelona 