mediabistro.com recently ran an interview with Guy Kawasaki, the former Apple evangelist turned venture capitalist/online expert who'll be taking part in next month's User-Generated Conference & Expo, which promises to "bring together content-trendsetters and business leaders in various fields to examine how these worlds collide and what the future holds... with successful case studies and business models in four tracks: social content, photography, video & gaming, and music." Kawasaki—who collated some of the best advice from his blog into the recently published Reality Check—tells us that he believes user-generated content will continue to thrive, even in this troubled economy. "You could make the case that all these people who are less employed or unemployed have even more time," he says. "I mean, it's a cycle, and we're in the down part of the cycle, but I don't think everyone's going to be turning in their computers and washing dishes all day." (That's a markedly different view than Andrew Keen's assertion last fall that the recession would kill "amateur" media.)

Kawasaki also recommends that media companies should get themselves onto Twitter and keep an eye out for opportunities to make relevant contributions to the flow of information. "Many people view email and Twitter as kind of an adjunct to their main function; for me, it is my main function, and everything else is adjunct," he says. "Twitter for me is not something I do when work is done for fun; Twitter is what I do."