This blog is probably one of the many you’ll visit today, not to mention the trips to Facebook and YouTube for your daily fix, and during it all, you’ll be tweeting your thoughts. User generated content, has become woven into mainstream lifestyle, because platforms like YouTube, Flickr, Wordpress, and Twitter, have allowed this creation and consumption of content to become ubiquitous. Now that we have infrastructure in place – where are we today? Where do you make money? How do you stand out? Where do you find the time?

I explored these questions during “User Generated Content : State of the Union, ” with the  5 panelists  Dean McCall : Founder, IdeaGin, Podcastready; Stephen Newman : CEO, Mouth Watering Media; Todd Morrey : Mosso : The Rackspace Cloud; Wes Wilson : President, IncSpring; and Chris Tolles : CEO & Co-Founder, Topix.

Listening to the panel discuss and debate how to monetize user generated content, revealed that even the domain’s leading experts and early adopters don’t know how to monetize it – an unusual phenomenon in our capitalist society. To me this begged the unspoken question – is money even the right currency to value the content or is it something else?

While technology is exponentially evolving, our ability to harness the value is lagging and we are now scratching our heads about how to monetize our content. There doesn’t seem to be a good way to get a handle on it. While I haven’t heard it explicitly said, is it possible that this struggle to monetize, to evaluate assets in dollars, is a sign that these assets are not meant to be monetized, but rather to be exchanged without money?

A radical thought, I looked back in time for support and found that my assumption is not without root. Back in 1934, the Swiss formed the WIR after the 1929 stock market crash caused severe cash shortage. To preserve the precious cash reservoirs, the WIR operated on a barter system – trading shares in each other’s companies, and thus sustaining its members with additional sales volume. By treating the economic circle as a community and serving the interests of its members, the WIR remains stable today despite the global economic crisis.

In the domain of user generated content, a barter system seems to be in place, where users are free to contribute and take content, and this content’s value might be determined by its applicability or its relevance. The panel discussed that if structured right, user generated content helps people help themselves. The community not only generates the content, but they monitor it allowing what’s best to percolate to the top, and what’s offensive to be taken out with the trash. While user contributed content doesn’t make a direct contribution to the platform company’s bottom line – it does have a positive indirect effect through the involvement of users and increased transparency that today’s consumers demand. Users are letting companies know exactly what they want, and providing a vetted knowledge base of relevant and applicable content – all without demand for cash reward.

Perhaps its time for companies to follow suit, and instead of trying to force user generated content into the mold of our monetary system, a system that is failing us today, let it evolve naturally into a community focused bartering model. It certainly seems like the more sustainable option.