Today’s post comes from Maggie Widdoes, Digital Marketing Account Coordinator at Lippe Taylor.

While open source-style community contribution has been a feature on BuzzFeed for over five years, the ‘open-sourceness’ of it has received little recognition. Until now, that is. This week, the site introduced BuzzFeed Community – a separate vertical for “collaborative posts, original contributions from users, and other awesome stuff that we don’t know about yet because it’s going to be invented by BuzzFeed’s Community” whom the site admits “have essentially been running the show behind the scenes for years anyway.”

BuzzFeed Community is an important, albeit overdue, step in the development of open-source digital content. Legitimizing and facilitating user-generated content with this kind of system feature bridges the user/creator gap in a new and exciting way. Only time can tell the overall effects of the Community feature, but we expect it will involve lots of cat memes and pop culture exposés.