User generated content is a great thing. It unshackles the creative bounds of the general population by easing the creation and dissemination of creative expression. It’s a wonderful trend that has created countless citizen journalists, comedians, stuntmen, and made for a non-stop 24/7/365 platform for a quasi “America’s Funniest Home Video’s” in the form of YouTube. User generated content is also at the heart of Second Life. After launching in 1999, Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, tried a few business approaches to virtual worlds before seizing on the user creation angle where users could not only create content but posess it and transact in a virtual economy. As with all user generated content, your experience in Second Life will vary with the quality of the content, and it’s not all that great at times. We don’t watch “America’s Funniest Home Videos” all the time on TV, if we did we would miss out on content like “Lost”, “The Simpsons”, and “Seinfeld” that both tastes great and is more filling at the same time.

Professional content will almost always trump user generated content in terms of production values and star talent. While it does annoy us at times with yet another bad Freddy Prinze movie, it does provide us with content creators like MTV, Disney and Nickelodeon. So what if those firms immersed their immense creative talents in virtual worlds, transforming some of their legacy original content and new initiatives into virtual worlds more attuned to their target audiences. It has already begun, and it marks the beggining of the next stage of Virtual Worlds online.

MTV, not necessarily a bastion of great original programming, has recently taken their “The O.C.” knockoff “Laguna Beach” virtual with the aptly named “Virtual Laguna Beach”. Where the world is prepopulated with professional content and more importantly context. The originality or quality of it is for someone other than me to judge, but as long as the real world viewers of “Laguna Beach” think that show has merit, they will have a strong likelyhood of finding value in the virtual version - audience immersion or the willful suspension of disbelief taken to new level. More interesting and much more compelling (trust me on this) are the virtual worlds and immersive experiences just launched by Nickelodeon and Disney. Nicktropolis launched today and is filled with the world of Nickelodeon, from its characters to its brand promise - and it’s safe for kids! The new Disney.com is relaunching in the coming days and will have an immersive experience with a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) based on the Pirates of the Carribean and social networking where Disney characters and storylines intersect with the users. User content has its place, but at times the experts can create an experience and a setting that is timeless and fulfilling in a way that a handycam and the 19 year old skateboarder next door jumping off his roof cannot. Content from people we trust to create content we care about and content that is safe for wider audiences. Inevitably there will be virtual worlds created solely for adult oriented interests. And more power to them, as they will have the exact type of content the people who interact with them will expect to see.

As new as virtual worlds seem, they have existed all along, but we have had to buy tickets to places like Disneyworld to immerse ourselves in them. Second Life will continue to thrive with their virutal economy and the massive randomness that makes user generated content compelling in its own right. But some experts in virtual worlds have entered the picture and there is a ready audience of current fans of their creative efforts that will see and enjoy the experience.