The User-Generated Content Game

March 4th, 2008

Question for you: as of 10:30pm on March 3, 2008, which of the following blog or news posts from today have the most user-sumitted comments?

Maybe you can spot the dark-horse winner here, and maybe you can't. I'll make it a bit more clear: boingboing.net, techcrunch.com, huffingtonpost.com, and icanhascheezburger.com are all in the Technorati Popular top 10 blogs. sfgate.com, on the other hand, is not ranked in the top 10, nor even the 100. Readership-wise, it stands to reason that the vague, 4-sentence article about a horrible road-rage incident in Oakland, CA should not be as commented upon as today's most popular articles from top-10 blogs. So, how did this little local article stand up?

  • Do coat hangers sound as good as Monster cables? (boingboing.net) - 46 comments.
  • Marc Andreessen For Obama (techcrunch.com) - 110 comments.
  • The $3,000,000,000,000 War is a Domestic Issue (huffingtonpost.com) - 156 comments.
  • Ceiling cat makes his glorious appearence in da sky! (icanhascheezburger.com) - 180 comments.
  • Man on life-support after being beaten following a car crash (sfgate.com) - 197 comments.

But wait! Here comes the M. Night Shyamalan surprise twist of an ending -- how did today's SFGate's article "State Supreme Court takes up same-sex marriage" do?

State Supreme Court takes up same-sex marriage

635 comments in one day. That's 64 pages of juicy user-submitted content to be ad-targeted, sold, and/or data mined. Internet gold.

SFGate, really? I read SFGate on a regular basis and have gotten into the habit of looking at the article's comment-counts. I'm continually surprised at the amount of user-contributed comments for what is basically the digital version of the printed newspaper. Plus, these are local stories, not reprints of national or international AP articles. Personally I think this is really big. Somehow, someway, "S.F. braces for major health care cuts" (86 comments) got over twice the comments today than celebrity gossip "Lindsay [Lohan] Invites You Into Her Mystical World of Tattoos" (40 comments.) in our celebrity-obsessed world. The same-sex marriage article was written by Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer, not celebri-blogger Michael Arrington or professional pundit and one time California gubernatorial candidate Huffington. Nope: Bob wrote it, and his article probably generated more direct user feedback than any of the other "regular" blog out there today.

(I'm intentionally punting on the Digg issue: sites like digg.com generate massive amounts of user contributed content.)

So what's going on here? What's different? Is it the newspaper? People love the paper. Is it that people are invested local issues? Today's story about local computer programmer Hans Reiser's murder trail has generated 91 comments, up from 86 from 10 minutes ago, and 83 about 10 minutes before that: it's 11:30pm PST time and people are reading the newspaper, then the comments, and adding to the conversation.

And now midnight: 94 comments.

This really fascinates me. People are very invested in this local news site in a way that seems to keep up, if not beat (in the user-generated content game), many niche sites out there that appeal to people's specific passions (read: Long Tail): gadget sites, computer programming humor, hockey, knitting. Maybe that's the answer: it's not different at all -- the San Francisco Bay Area is niche, too. But I suspect that people care more about it than other niches, since those of us that live here can walk outside and see our fellow SFBA-niche enthusiasts walking down the street, eating in restaurants, trying to park, and bitching about MUNI. How many Lindsay Lohan lovers have you spied today?

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