USER GENERATED CONTENT AS PART OF A CONTENT STRATEGY FOR THE WEB

What is User Generated Content (UGC)

• The production of content by the general public rather than by paid professionals and experts in the field.
• Website content, for example text, images, videos, that are contributed by its users rather than the website owners.
• It is what we create — our conversations, our thoughts, our opinions and our imagination expressed.
• User generated content refers to material on websites, and occasionally other media sources that is produced by the users of the website.
• User-generated content is often associated with ratings, reviews, forums, media sharing, social profiles within a niche community, and similar opportunities for consumers to publish and share.
• Other aspect of content generated by users are Blogs and wikis. These are becoming more and more commonplace, as stand-alone websites or within an organisation’s website
• Websites such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube are totally reliant on user generated content, in the form of blogs/comments, photos- , image galleries- and videos respectively,
• User-generated content has the goal of enfranchising the user and, indirectly, giving a greater sense of authenticity to the content.
• UGC builds community and increases brand loyalty by engaging consumers with photos and video submissions, polling, text and video commenting, blogs, community sites, forums and community calendars.
• companies like Amazon and Yelp (and Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and plenty of others), user-generated content has created the mother of all catch-22s: It causes them untold amounts of misery and headaches on a daily basis, and yet without those users and the content they produce, many of these companies would be severely diminished — and in some cases wouldn’t exist at all. For better or worse, they are married to their users, and divorce is not an option.

Types of UGC

UGC exists in a variety of forms, including

• blogs; micro-blogs (such as those uploaded to Twitter);
• user reviews (such as product reviews made on Amazon.com);
• content uploaded to social networking sites(such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+);
•  photographs and videos uploaded to file-sharing sites (such as Flickr, SnapFish and YouTube);
• information uploaded to wikis(such as Wikipedia and Wetpaint);
• Content uploaded to virtual world websites(such as Second Life).

  UGC in Practice

• Interviews. – Asking the community for suggestions of whom to interview and what questions to ask is a great way to get people involved.
• Social Q&A. Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn, and sites like Quora can provide very useful platforms to present questions and attract answers from a variety of people
• Contests resulting in content. Examples of contests in which consumers produce their own videos and share images abound on the social web. Search engines love any kind of content, especially text.
• Comment feedback loop. One of the most meaningful ways for a community to engage with a brand is through comments on a company blog. Asking readers to participate in a dialogue by commenting can result in content that is better than the original blog post.
• Book authoring by community. Reaching out to industry experts to share their insights as part of a larger project can be very effective. Author Michael Miller did this with Online Marketing Heroes, of which I was a part. He interviewed 25 successful marketers; the results of those interviews became the book.
•  Soliciting subject matter experts to write articles of 1,000 words or so on pre-determined topics. The brand serves as editor to compile the articles into an e-book, which can be used as fulfilment in a lead generation campaign.
• Image- and photo-driven websites, such as Flickr, could request users insert alternative descriptions, either of their own or other people’s photos. Ensuring this actually happens across the site though will be difficult to impossible to achieve.

Prevalence of UGC 

• It is estimated that there are currently over 172,000,000 identified blogs online, with over 100,000 new blogs being created each day.
• It was estimated in June 2010 that the world annually spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites, representing 22% of all time online.
• In 2010, social network or blog sites were visited by 75% of global consumers who went online, a 24% increase over2009.
• It has also been predicted that by 2013 there will be nearly 135 million U.S. UGC consumers (i.e., viewers) and more than 114 million UGC creators and that UGC creators will account for approximately 52% of all U.S. Internet users.
• The two most visited websites on the Internet, Facebook and YouTube, are sites devoted to UGC. According to Facebook, which has more than 800 million active users, every day, more than 250 million photos are uploaded to the site and more than two billion posts are “liked” and commented on.
•  Each day, YouTube exceeds three billion views and more than 48 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute, the vast majority of which are UGC.
• Twitter has also become increasingly more popular with more than 106 million user accounts. It has been estimated that there are over 90 million “tweets” (posts uploaded to Twitter) created per day.
• Wikipedia, ranked as the sixth most visited website, provides access to over 18 million UGC articles in 279 languages.

Why Use User Generated Content

• Its widespread and increasing popularity has led many businesses to utilize UGC in their corporate websites to attract the millions of users who consume and create UGC.
• Utilizing UGC helps businesses increase website traffic (by boosting the site’s search engine optimization), attract new customers, generate brand awareness and strengthen customer loyalty.
• Online entrepreneurs have been looking for ways to profit from the massive popularity of UGC. It has been projected that UGC websites, such as YouTube and Facebook, earned $4.3 billion in advertising revenue in 2011. YouTube sells text ads, ban-Internet and graphic overlays for as much as $20 per thousand viewers, targeting audiences based on video content or viewer demographics – There is a huge potential market for business

What is good about User Generated Content?

• Exploiting UGC to Generate Knowledge-  A ready library of varied information to be tapped and used as pleased. Fast generation of content.

Many charities and membership organisations, such as the Institute of Physics, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland and Cancer Research UK, have knowledge as a central part of their core values and one of the key reasons for people joining these organisations is to access knowledge or encourage continuing knowledge generation through various forms of collaborations

The table below gives an analysis of the different types of UGC collaborations used by these organisations to generate knowledge .

• Helps a brand create new, meaningful content and provides an opportunity for relevant recognition of participants within the brand’s social community.
• UGC is trusted. People tend to believe reviews from other participants  readers may trust opinions of their peers over the website itself, particularly in an ecommerce setting (reviews in particular
• Contributors have an interest in helping promote the content. increased loyalty from users – satisfaction of contributing to the site
• UGC provides more content for search engines. SEO benefits (content, frequently updated)
• UGC provides more information sources for prospects and customers.
• UGC publishing allows for critical feedback about products and services.
• UGC publishing provides tools for brand evangelists.
• UGC facilitates brand conversations within the marketplace.
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Opportunities

The opportunities around UGC fall into two main areas – reduced costs and better engagement and customer intelligence.

Reduced Costs

• For a publisher of information the opportunity to increase the amount of content produced without the attendant costs of employing additional editorial or content creation staff is, perhaps, an obvious one.
• At one extreme of this is YouTube, where a high proportion of uploaded videos have been created by amateurs. At the other end of the spectrum, some organisations use guest bloggers whose motivation in writing for free is to raise their own profile on a trusted site.
• Increasingly, however, marketers are turning to customers to provide content for their advertising campaigns or even as a replacement for such overt messages. Examples are widespread with Bild, a German tabloid newspaper, asking its readers to create their own video adverts for the publication.
• UGC often costs substantially less than a traditional marketing campaign with the added benefit of the content created often being seen as more trustworthy.

Customer Intelligence

One of the biggest opportunities is to “own” the conversation about a particular product, brand or subject.

• This can often be as simple as setting up a Facebook page and inviting people to become “fans”.
• Some organisations have engaged with consumers in a more innovative way, such as Dell with their Ideastorm website. This invited consumers to suggest improvements that could be made to Dell products and services and allowed people to vote on them. Dell interacted with these suggestions by posting responses. As well as providing Dell with an invaluable insight into what people wanted from them, the website also generated a lot of publicity, overwhelmingly positive.
• In addition, 69% of consumers who read reviews share them with friends, family or colleagues, thereby amplifying the reviews’ impact.
• It has been suggested that including both positive and negative product reviews on a company’s website establishes customer trust and loyalty.
• A number of companies use UGC in their advertising campaigns, a practice which enhances brand loyalty by enabling consumers to express their ideas and enthusiasm about products.
• For example, an ING Direct contest asked consumers to submit videos illustrating original ways to save money. The videos were uploaded to YouTube and ING Direct posted ten videos to its corporate website, where consumers could vote for their favourite video.

• In 2008, a Frito-Lay contest asked consumers to create and submit homemade Doritos commercials, which were posted online for consumers to vote for their favourite commercial. Frito-Lay aired the winning commercial during the 2009 Super Bowl broadcast and awarded the creators $1 million for receiving the most votes in the USA Today rankings of Super Bowl advertisements.
• In fact, as Nielsen highlighted in their July 2009 Global Online Consumer Survey , “ more than twice as many people listen to other consumers that they know when forming opinions on products or services”.

UGC, in the form of reviews or opinions posted online, are seen as equal in terms of trustworthiness to those on brand websites. This presents a great opportunity if organisations can successfully harness and nurture such opinions.

 Challenges of UGC

• Too much information -the question really is whether the technology is where it should be to allow us to sift through all the user-generated content and figure out what’s important to us as individuals.
• Companies hiring writers to impersonate community members so that the resulting content was of higher quality.
• The future of copyright issues, most recently SOPA and PIPA. A balance needs to be struck where creators can maintain rights in order to continue to make a living off of their work, yet keep the flow of information and creativity vital enough to inspire activity and connection between people.
• Content may be highly inaccurate, and may not be appropriate for the purpose of looking up material to obtain facts. Writers can presume authority or expertise where they have none, and the reader may not always be able to discern the false from the true.
• Websites such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube are totally reliant on user generated content, in the form of blogs, photos and videos respectively. How can these websites control the accessibility of their content? Content is created at such a rapid speed that it wouldn’t be reasonable (or even possible) for any of these websites to police that content for accessibility.
• While effective for companies without a staff of writers, the continuous creation of new content presents resource challenges. Concurrently, social media programs can run a bit dry if the brand isn’t engaging with the community on a regular basis.

The pitfalls can be grouped into two related areas – brand damage and legal issues

Brand damage

•  Abusive commenters (known as Trolls) can frighten other contributors off and lead to brand damage. In 2009, Mars embedded the live results of a search of Twitter for the word Skittles into a promotional website. People quickly realised that this was open to abuse and after Tweets saying that Skittles caused cancer got noticed by the company, the site was taken offline. The damage to reputation was done, however.
• Even TripAdvisor, the largest site that relies almost wholly on UGC, has to deal with issues around the trustworthiness of reviews. TripAdvisor employs a team of moderators and also uses sophisticated algorithms to detect fraudulent reviews. It flags reviews that it believes try to manipulate its popularity index but this in itself probably leads to a reduction in the trustworthiness of the whole site. This sense that even a small number of reviews may be fraudulent has opened the door for Oyster, a start-up that pays journalists a proper salary to undertake reviews anonymously.

Legal Issues

• Legal considerations are perhaps the most serious part of planning that needs to be carried out. “If it is illegal offline, it is illegal online.” This includes websites, social media and UGC. It should also be noted that disclaimers are not necessarily the way to all avoid problems.
• The proliferation of UGC in recent years has raised traditional legal issues, such as copyright infringement, defamation and violation of privacy rights, in a novel context, defamation and privacy are all areas that need to be considered. In February 2010, for example, three Google executives were found guilty of violation of privacy and given suspended jail sentences after YouTube hosted a video of a teenager with Down’s syndrome.
• One of the biggest areas for UGC innovation lies in global rights management. YouTube has launched a service called Content Identification allowing major content partners and rights holders to better identify user-uploaded versions of their videos. With these content management tools, major media companies partnering with YouTube are deciding if they want to block, track, or take steps to reduce infringement.
• They can also encourage fans to market or distribute the content for their own benefit. The future of UGC global rights management will lie in solutions that strike a perfect balance between the goals of the copyright holder and that of the user. It’s imperative that clients relinquish a bit of control over their brand voice and buy into the true value of UGC, i.e., arming customers with the mechanisms and information to be brand ambassadors
• Many website operators do not monitor the content posted to their websites, providing users with the opportunity to post defamatory material. False or misleading statements posted by a user may lead to claims of defamation against the website operator. In the U.S., the Communications Decency Act [the CDA] provides immunity to Internet service providers, including website operators, for causes of action that arise out of Internet content posted by a third party.

Difficulties with User Generated Content

• Resources are needed for oversight and moderation.
• Ease of publishing may lead to spam.
• Information could be false and out-dated.
• Ownership is unclear.
• Anonymity can lead to malfeasance. There is the potential for negative information about the brand to appear.
• Structuring UGC publishing can be challenging.

There are clear benefits to use of UGC through reduced costs of producing content and reduced marketing costs. Organisations can also become more involved in the conversation about their product or content and therefore better placed to influence opinions. Potential challenges include brand damage and legal problems. To mitigate against pitfalls, the use of UGC should be carefully planned for.

Planning to use UGC – The pitfalls

• Deciding on the best approach for taking advantage of UGC and the level of engagement needed
• Putting in place controls appropriate for your organisation
• Agreeing and publicising a simple and concise set of guidelines for posting of UGC
• Having a plan of what do to in the case that your worst scenario happens
• Being prepared to act quickly

Examples of Recent Problems

A recent examples of the downside of user-generated content come from Yelp.

• Yelp was hit by repeated lawsuits from businesses alleging that negative reviews of their companies or retail outlets appeared after they turned down an offer from Yelp to advertise with the service. Yelp’s response, in part, has been that users post negative reviews for their own reasons, and that this is simply a function of how the service works

Levels of engagement

There is a scale of different levels of engagement needed for UGC. UGC can be created with very little effort from the reader – merely reading an article, for example, can facilitate a “Most read” feature.

The next step up the effort scale is asking readers to undertake a very simple task, such as clicking a button saying whether they would recommend the article or product that they are looking at. Again, this information can be aggregated to create a “Most recommended” feature. Leaving comments requires a little more effort on the part of readers, but is still reasonably easy.

At the other end of the scale, many sites encourage readers or customers to contribute more extensive pieces of content. On TripAdvisor, for example, contributors can add reviews that cover a number of areas for a particular category of review including photos as well as text. In general an increase in engagement needs an increase in effort on the part of the consumer – see below.

Example of User generated content in Action

• Who’s reading what    “Most popular stories now” feature on news.bbc.co.uk
• Recommend                 “Recommend” feature on stories on Economist.com
• Tweets/comments      Innocent Drinks wall on Facebook
• Blog posts                     Guest bloggers on the British Medical Journal site
• Reviews                       TripAdvisor, and  Amazon
• Photos                          Flickr “pools” on sites such as Londonist
• Videos                           Al Jazeera encourages contributions
• Wikis                             Wikipedia
• Discussion boards        FlyerTalk

Even if organisations do not actively engage, it is likely that their brand or content is being used in UGC of one type or another on sites that they do not control themselves, particularly for high profile brands such as airlines and consumer goods – there have been some well documented examples of successes here, such as Virgin Atlantic, as well as failures.

Technology Solutions

Most of these CMS systems are based in ASP.NET and PHP

Content management  systems available allows the incorporation of  social networking, blogs, audio, video and other forms of rich media into existing business models.

If it is a blogging system, forum, wiki”, Word Press, phpBB and MediaWiki are the three things that come to mind. Most of these content management systems are equipped with tagging features and enable users to comment, vote,  and blog. Most of these types of CMS are, written in PHP or ASP. They are configurable and extendable systems of a wide range of content types and has a huge range of pre-written modules and plugins .

There are CMS modules like Agility CMS?  which has a UGC module that allows you to build custom content types for your user submissions and then allows you to hook the logins in with Facebook Connect or other provider. This CMS is built on ASP.net

On-stream Digital Media Services Platform (DMSP) is a robust platform that makes it easy for organizations to create and share data, video and voice assets with co-workers, customers, partners and investors worldwide. This enables collaboration in real-time with partners, distribute video ads across various online ad networks or offer fee-based, multi-media products to customers on-demand,

With a simple click, you can deploy all or just some of your website contents via one or more RSS channels, to enable your users to follow you through an RSS aggregator.

The relationship between the content and the content creator once published

There is a trade-off between ease of publishing to 3rd party websites and the amount of control you retain over your content.

• On a blog you have more control if you change your mind about a post you can amend / revoke / delete to your heart’s content.
• Once the post has been submitted, control is handed over to the site owners. From that point the author will have no control over whether the content is published or not. If the author come back later and spot a spelling mistake he/she would not be able to amend or delete.
• 3rd party publishers give the user varied levels of control once the content is published. Some sites let you amend and some let you delete but often once you’ve pressed submit your control disappears. What happens if you decide to close your account and leave the service?

On Flickr you’re given the option to get all your content packaged up for download / portability elsewhere. But on lots of sites this facility doesn’t exist.

Basically if you choose to publish content via a 3rd party (even if that 3rd party software is installed and running on your server) you’ll likely cede some control to them. So if my street gets flooded and I publish a photograph of the flood on my website (using no 3rd party publishing tools) I retain control and can licence how I see fit. If I send the same photo to my local newspaper / broadcaster’s website the chances are they’ll claim a licence for reuse and most probably permission to sub-licence to 4th parties.

Typical Standard Terms of Service

Most well known websites including the likes of BBC Yahoo, Twitter, the Guardian and even word Press would have standard terms of service to define the ownership and the right to use  content posted by users. Below is the standard term of reference for Yahoo  

“With respect to all other Content you elect to post to other publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Yahoo! the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sub-licensable right and licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed.”

Funding/ monetising of site

No author is paid for contributions to Wikipedia, which makes this type of user generated content distinct from other types. For example, blog sites, where users can blog about any topic under the sun may carry ads, which if clicked on, mean a share of profits for the bloggers. The percentage of profits varies from site to site.

Other times, bloggers may simply be paid a percentage of the profit for having ads on their site, and are paid by the number of people visiting the site. So there is particular impetus to have blogs that will be read by others. This often translates to better blogs being read by a high number of people. Excellence in writing can have its rewards.

There’s another model for harnessing user-generated content that not only spurs trust in the content, but creates extra value that people will pay for.  AngiesList.com is a typical example – where people rate local service businesses, from plumbers to doctors. You have to be a member (from $20-50 a year) to rate a business or use the list. More than a million people have joined in over 200 cities in the USA– so they are pulling in roughly $30 million from membership alone, plus ad revenue that is restricted to those companies that have the highest ratings.  Members are happy to pay because they trust the user reviews knowing they come from people who are committed to supporting and using the list.. Angie’s List has also created algorithms and a small team of people to look for and investigate suspicious reviews and weed out people trying to scam the ratings.

Moderation

How can anyone sort through the ton of dross to find commentary that’s in some way useful?

The problem isn’t with UGC, it is with the filtering, sorting and prioritization and that’s where the technology, the semantic web and also the ability to filter through the lens of a social graph is going to make a big difference.

• A simple ranking of content — one basic example of annotation would be an easily sifted way of letting you know what someone thought about a piece of content, without the noise. Collectively, this kind of user contribution could lead to something resembling real added value, while saving a place for the user’s voice.
• Peer Review: Sites like Wikipedia, where anyone can write an article with sufficient expertise. Other users may evaluate the content, suggest changes, or even make changes. Some material on Wikipedia carries warnings that an author is now espousing opinion, or that certain statements are not verifiable or have been called into question by other users.
• Value created when people have to commit, with a few dollars, to joining a community and maintaining the integrity and value of their collective created content.
• complicated software algorithms to detect inappropriate UGC

The problem is not with the user, it’s with the publisher and their responsibility to moderate the content. It’s not about “user-generated content” being a necessary evil for Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. It’s about those companies figuring out a way to moderate bad content out of the conversation so it doesn’t ruin the experience for other readers and users. You rarely hear complaints about NYTimes.com comments, mainly because they are all moderated well. Yelp and Amazon on the other hand need to pay attention to moderation or people won’t trust what they read there.

Crowd Sourcing and UGC

Crowdsourcing is the practice of presenting the community with a problem along with a plea to assist in its solution. For example, Netflix offered a prize of $1,000,000 for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings of films. There were 184 teams competing to beat Netflix’s own algorithm for predicting ratings of movies that customers would like by 10 per cent.

In the case of crowdsourcing and user-generated content, the approach is similar, except the “problem” is the creation of content around a particular topic, and there’s no million-dollar prize.

Crowdsourcing helps a brand create new, meaningful content and provides an opportunity for relevant recognition of participants within the brand’s social community.

The Future of User Generated Content

• User-generated content has only been a mainstream phenomenon since 2005. Even by Internet standards, its proliferation and growing cultural impact have been astonishing.
• Through personal blogs, social networks, online communities and discussion boards, product reviews, wikis, news sites, travel sites, video and photo-sharing sites, average citizens are exerting an increasingly profound influence over our culture and economy. Entire industries are being transformed. Retail, for example, will never be the same:
• 81% of people use consumer reviews in their purchase decisions. [Source: Nielsen Online via BizReport, Feb 2009] Online reviews are second only to word-of-mouth when it comes to influencing consumer purchasing decisions. [Source: Rubicon Consulting, Oct 2008]
• UGC is only getting bigger. According to e-Marketer, the number of people creating user-generated content online will rise from 88.8 million in 2009 to 114.5 million in 2013.
• There is much at stake for those who can capitalize successfully on the evolution of user-generated content.
• The flow of information through social media and other UGC channels has grown so dramatically that many of us have reached overload. According to digital research firm E-consultancy:
• There are more than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3 million.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More and more people are tuning out in response. Last year, both the New York Times (Facebook Exodus) and Newsweek covered the growing number of defections by beleaguered Facebook users.

According to studies by Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group:

• 90% of online visitors to social sites are “lurkers” (people who look, but don’t contribute)
• 9% are occasional contributors
• Only 1% are active contributors

And we know they’re overwhelmingly young. A study by Rubicon Consulting found that young people aged 22 and under account for about half of the content and comments posted online.

• It is ironic that the concept of consumer-generated media, so often portrayed as a democratizing force that empowers consumers to participate in the conversation versus just being spoken to, is actually dominated by a small fraction of relatively young Internet users.

Conclusion: Power to the people?

The success of UGC has created new opportunities for consumers and brands, but also new challenges; primarily how to deal with the massive amount of content that is available. What are needed are new methods to filter all of that information for relevance, as well as reputation, accuracy and similarity of viewpoint. Until that happens, our growing body of UGC faces the prospect of becoming a collection of noise that we no longer bother to rely upon in the future.

For many businesses, it is no longer a question of if they want to incorporate UGC or include the participatory Web as part of their long-term business strategy. It is more of a question on what is the best approach and most reliable, scalable technology platform?

Even if organisations do not actively engage, it is likely that their brand or content is being used in UGC of one type or another on sites that they do not control themselves, particularly for high profile brands such as airlines and consumer goods – there have been some well documented examples of successes here, such as Virgin Atlantic, as well as failures.

Tomorrows winners will be the brands that not only help people to participate in UGC revolution but make it more manageable and meaningful for them as well. Businesses can either continue to ignore User Generated Content at their own peril or decide to actively incorporate social networking, blogs, audio, video and other forms of rich media into their existing business models.

A number of court decisions will provide guidance as to rights and obligations that arise in connection with UGC, both for users who post the content and for website operators on whose sites the content is posted, many of these decisions are under consideration and numerous issues have yet to reach the courts. The next few years will likely provide answers to many legal questions concerning UGC, although new forms of UGC and new ways of using it will evolve and undoubtedly raise new questions.

This course is being taught at a very high level of presumed knowledge in photo shop and Illustrator and so I am really struggling with the teaching notes on eye learn. Any idea where I can find an easier explanation on this subject?

David, – My password and username couldn’t get me into the students forum. Could you please help.

Help please!!! I have done the difficult bit of coursework 3 – writing the codes, validation and uploading onto the remote server – using filezilla- not sure where I am going wrong but I can’t seem to get it on the web!!!- This is very new territory for me so the problem could be very basic- a bit fustrating. Any ideas? – thanks.

I adore Ebay.- Simply the best. There is no better site for trading. The guys have perfected the art of buying and selling. the site works well. You can find almost everything under this sun – most times cheaper than in the shops – There is an ingenious system that allows you to check the credibility of the seller and buyer. Also you can pay electronically without any issues at all. And if you are ripped off, there is a reporting mechanism that works. This system is global yet in your room you feel like you are buying just down the road.  Here is the link  http://www.ebay.co.uk/ - try it out.

What about You Tube ? You can spend the whole day watching films , listening to music and soaking yourself in other peoples creations, inventions and many more. The site is easy to navigate. It has a huge data base and a very good searching facility. You don’t have to be boffin to enjoy this site. I have included the link for your information http://www.youtube.com/

My favourite of all the site is http://www.britishlime.org/edu_limemade01.php This is simple web site providing very important information about how lime is produced in the simplest of language. The site is has a lot of information , but is presented at different levels /sheets and so it is not all in your face at the same time . There are also a lot of illustration and big pictures, simple to understand and easy to navigate.