I worked at an AOL-like portal company called ‘Korea.com’ as a service and contents planner for about two years. It was right after I had my master’s degree. I was in charge of the education section and worked with a lot of CPs (Content Providers). I kept thinking about what kinds of contents that I should be sourcing and how to display them in order to attract more users and increase revenue from paid contents. Yes! We were content provider and our users were content consumers. Now with Web 2.0 technologies, users are generating contents and they are consuming those contents. They are produsers! If I knew this Produsage concept 20 years ago, how could I design my education portal? The cost of contents development should have been much cheaper! However, I wonder how I could start the produsage service and lead users to contribute to it. As I created my own produsage forum for my assignment, I had such issues of how to make users subscribe to my forum and voluntarily write some posts. I searched for some similar forums…those forums had more than a thousand subscribers and they were actively generating contents by interacting with one another. How could the moderators spur those interactions? I really wonder… If I built a produsage website for a formal learning, I may not worry about produsers and their interaction because we always have students in our class! I thought informal learning would be easier because there is no lesson plan. But, it turned out to be more difficult to build a community than formal learning. Alas…Will my produsage website ever evolve into a community? I am really wondering… ;-(
