Jon Udell at Infoworld hates the expression “user-generated content,” with excellent reason. In “User-generated content vs. reader-created context,” he writes:
Now that the original vision of a two-way web is finally made real, we can distinguish between amateur storytellers (in the best and highest sense of amateur) and professional storytellers. Thanks to the contributions of the amateurs — who are of course professional practitioners of the disciplines that we “cover” — we can tell deeper, richer, more well-informed stories about the products and services they create, and the work they do. Those stories are valuable, and the business I want to be in is based on that value, not on the “monetization” of “user-generated content”.
His suggestions for replacement language don’t go quite far enough, in part because not everyone is trying to add context when they speak. Some people want their voices to be heard, and that’s it.