Nivi gets that content = communications

I just discovered a fantastic blog by this guy Nivi, who has a smart piece up called "There is no such thing as user-created content." Sample blurb:

User-generated content is all the rage! Unfortunately, there is no such thing.

Users are not interested in generating content.

They are interested in communicating.

Blogs are not content. They are communication.

The “15 million” bloggers out there do not consider themselves publishers. Probably only a few hundred or a thousand of those bloggers are “publishing”. The rest of them are communicating. Just like they communicate over email or telephone or IM. They are regular folks who are just talking.

I love it. I agree. I have written two posts during the past year that discusssed the "Extended Conversation"; my recent Cringely/Skype post, where I said:

I don't have any inside information on this point, but I can see that Skype is most attractive to Yahoo and Google and Microsoft and IAC and... NewsCorp, I guess, given that they're now buying web properties. All these guys get that communications+media = the future, because media is professional content and communications is user-created content and their combination is the "architecture of participation" which is Web 2.0. Why doesn't Cringely get this? He's got all the pieces in front of him.

and back in January, I mentioned the Extended Conversation:

We used to have "conversations" on the telephone. Some of us had "correspondence" via letters, but not since the days of Voltaire could letters be considered "conversations". (Incidentally, did you know that in London, the Post Office delivered mail four times a day before the advent of telephony?) Then we added email, and IM, and suddenly the web went broadband and storage got cheap, and somewhere in there search engines actually started to work, and then a bunch of crazies went and invented the whole blogging paradigm, and there were digital cameras everywhere, and social networks had their moment of glory but left a lasting impression, and then (finally, in the US!) cellphones started getting smart instead of dumb (if only mobile operators would follow, the dummies!) and we are starting to see the emergence of this big gnarly thing called the extended conversation that is going to encompass everything in exactly the same way that the phone system used to touch on everything, except this time we aren't just stuck in voice, and we can tie it all together in a pretty package with a bright red ribbon. Some people call this Web 2.0. I call it the Extended Conversation.

This guy Nivi is smart. Read his blog.