Everyone is familiar with News Content, Shopping Content, Travel Content, Entertainment Content, Finance Content…. and so on. The Content that is of specific interest to SmartCrowds is Expression Content. By this term, we mean the content that is created when an individual expresses himself or herself. One might naturally conclude that a painting, a musical score, a play is expression content. It most certainly is!. However, when we use this term, what we have in mind is limited to subjective expressions people make online via words, choices, decisions, predictions and judgements. Another characteristic we limit ourselves to, is that this content must be amenable to meaningful processing by machines. All Expression Content is User Generated (except for some Editorial stuff), but not all User Generated Content is Expression Content. By our definition, a video posted to YouTube, a picture uploaded to Flickr, an article written on Wikipedia are not examples of Expression Content.

We find Expression Content all over the web on Blogs, Polls/Surveys, Ratings/Reviews, Prediction Markets, Q&A sites, etc. However, we haven’t seen any evidence of a holistic view across these Expression mechanisms. When one rises above these content silos, and views them through a common lens, certain compelling ideas readily present themselves. A Topical Hub for Expression Content is one such.

Let’s put things in perspective. Our intuition is that a shopping decision is made by individuals far less often than participating in creation/consumption of expression content. And yet, when you look around the web, shopping tools & solutions are in plentiful numbers, with more getting created by startups as you read this. But there is not nearly enough of activity around Human Expression, and the existing solutions are scattered & silo’d. At SmartCrowds, we hope to create the value inherent in unifying these silos.