by Can Tran

Created on: September 27, 2007

With the popularity of blogs and websites such as YouTube, user generated content or (UGC) has gotten to be pretty valuable within the last few years. Before they had websites such as YouTube, the most popular things were blogs. People would blog their opinions and thoughts on all sorts of issues: Iraq, healthcare, Hurricane Katrina recovery, employment, elections, and so forth.

I tend to watch CNN and MSNBC a lot to keep in track of what's going on in the world today. Wolf Blitzer has two assistants on the show that do read responses from the various bloggers. The blogs tended to be the first form of popular UGC. But there are going to be mixed reactions as it can be helpful to harmful. That's the price of UGC as just about anybody and everybody can take advantage of putting their UGCs online.

Recently, numerous public awareness ads and public service announcements have aired on TV telling people to think before they post. Personal blogs used by teenagers and other students have proven to be pretty harmful by posting stuff they shouldn't have posted in the first place. In short, that tended to attract a bunch of sexual predators. However, it might have been a good thing that happened as it exposed the dangerous of posting stuff online.

In the terms of personal online journals, it caused a lot of tension between students at school. Even school administrators have started taking action and cracking down on MySpace users. Even parents had taken action monitoring their children's activity online as a result of all the dangers posted.

With all that aside, user generated content is one of the biggest ways to exercise your first amendment rights which is the freedom of speech. Writing this article here on Helium is an example of me submitting my UGC and at the same time exercising my first amendment rights. But everybody has a voice, like it or not.

For example, you can post a blog entry strongly criticizing the Bush administration. At the same time, a group of people could fire back in the form of a "flame" saying that you're "unpatriotic" and that you "hate" the United States. Think of it in this sense, every action is followed by a reaction regardless of positive, negative, or neutral. In a sense, you can post something some people won't like. In response, they might post something you might not like.

I personally wish people like Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly would just STFU. But, it's a free country. They're entitled towards uploading their content just as we

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