Crowdsourcing

Nick Carr on the Youtube Star: Required Reading

By Jeff and Alan ...

On Friday Youtube started paying some of the most popular of its videographers. Om Malik, I believe, broke the story. The ever incisive Nicholas Carr of Rough Type, muses over the move to reward the "You Tube elite." This move constitutes somewhat of vindication for Carr, who entered into a highly publicized wager with the Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler last summer over whether social production (aka crowdsourcing) could survive without being eventually sullied by the emergence of a system of monetary rewards.

I've always found the debate a bit beside the point. I call both Wikipedia (which relies on non-monetary rewards) and a model like iStockPhoto (which relies on a combination of monetary and non-monetary compensation) to constitute a fundamentally new mode of production. I call it ... Oh, you know what I call it, don't you. Regardless, Youtube's move is a significant (and overdue) development in the maturation of the crowdsourcing model, and Carr's post provides much food for thought. And if you haven't read the original post by Carr that spawned the wager, it's here. Benkler's reply is here. Oh, and because I'll use any opportunity I can to plug Benkler's book, if you haven't read his The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, go buy it here, now.

Photophiles Needed!

As I noted in my previous post, Assignment Zero will be producing feature stories on a reduced number of topics. In true crowdsourcing fashion, our contributors made this decision for us. If there's one similarity among all crowdsourcing models, it's that you do not control your contributors. That's the tacit contract in crowdsourcing: The crowdsourcer can't delegate work. It can only provide opportunities. The crowd decides the rest.

I can't exactly argue with the crowd's verdict, and in most cases I agree with it. We've had tremendous response to a handful of subjects, including the creation of Citizendium (we recently published the resulting article on Wired.com); and crowdsourcing in the novel, journalism and film. Clearly there's a thread to be teased out here. People get enthusiastic about culture, and how participatory technologies are changing the way it's produced and distributed. Likewise the topic of crowdsourcing in religion has drawn thoughtful, insightful reportage, and this too is understandable and to be applauded. I look forward to the results from all these projects.

But that said, I fear we're being forced to discard a few topics that I view as indispensable to any exploration of this phenomenon. Chief among these lacunae is the rise of the microstock industry. Stock photography has been irrevocably changed by the emergence of cheap, royalty-free photography, much of it shot by amateurs and sold through the so-called "microstock" agencies. Microstock undercuts its traditional stock photo competitors by well over 90 percent, and comprises, as far as I can tell, the most mature development of a crowdsourcing model in any industry. Anyone interested in how user-generated content is going to transform mass media needs to pay serious attention to the roiling waters in the photography world.

I know that a lot of photographers subscribe to my feed, or check this blog out regularly, and I'm hoping a few of you will agree with me and decide to contribute. We need people to interview key players involved with iStockPhoto, Fotolia, and ShutterStock, et. al. in an effort to determine how these companies have helped transform the world of stock photography. Who else should we interview? Are you ready to take some time to pitch in and increase our coverage of micostock houses? Let the editors of Assignment zero know here.

I know this subject inspires considerable passion (and divisiveness) in the photography community. This is your chance to transfer some of that passion into a researched, widely read and hopefully influential work of journalism.

Changes at Assignment Zero

As I noted yesterday, we're entering the final stretch at Assignment Zero. We've already learned some valuable lessons (which I'll explore in great detail in an upcoming piece for Wired.com) and we've responded mid-stream by modifying our ambitions somewhat. Instead of attempting to produce scores of magazine style features on how crowdsourcing has affected various fields and industries, we'll choose the half-dozen topics that have drawn the greatest amount of interest from our contributors, and explore the other topics through Q&A's with the key people involved. We're putting a lot of focus into what we're calling Interview Week. We've identified roughly 60 players in the world of crowdsourcing, and so far we've had an excellent sign-up rate from contributors interested in conducting interviews with them. There are still lots of openings however, so if you're interested go here to sign up.

Back from Vacation: Link Round Up

Excuse the long absence. I spent the month traveling for the book and a week in Paris with the fam. Some people can balance demanding jobs and still write daily updates. I'm both mystified and mildly jealous. At any rate, expect a return to regular updates. We'll start off with one of Alan's round-ups, with a few additions from me:

Assignment Zero's Sneak Preview (on Wired.com): We've had our ups and downs at Assignment Zero, but we decided to release one of our articles early, and I think it does our experiment credit. Super-contributor Mike Ho wrote a feature about Larry Sanger's Citizendium, a controlled, expert-filtered version of Wikipedia. Assignment Zero is wrapping up, and I'll be providing more updates on the project as we enter the final stretch.

Miranda July from the movie Me, You and Everyone We Know and Harrell Fletcher have created this site: Learning to love you more. Choose an assignment. Assignment 59. Interview someone who has experienced war or assignment 31. Spend time with a dying person. Hard to label this venture but an innovative attempt to redefine participation! (Note: We're also hoping to cover LTLYM on AssignmentZero, so if you're into July or her art crowdsourcing joint, sign up to do some reporting on it, or to interview Fletcher and July.

A security lawyer's detailed look at Cambrian House. He states "there may always be an imbalance between the benefit a company can get from the community and the equity value the company can give back to individuals within that community."  STARTUP TOOLBOX  predicts that crowdsourcing isn't ready for securities offerings.

Outsourcing crowdsourcing? O'REILY Digital Media looks at worldofdt.com a post-production work facility for photographers based in New Delhi, India. It might sound like a stretch but if you are at all serious about submitting photos to a micro-stock agency, it's worth the read.

This might be older news but certainly an indicator of how crowdsourcing is going to get the attention of the goliaths. Deep Jive Interests title says it all. Dells Crowdsourcing More Than Hype: Tells Microsoft to "Suck It."

Business Week's David Armano talks about evolving platforms and human behavior. He starts with "Once upon a time" and tells the story we are going to hear more often. "It's the Conversation Economy, Stupid" might not be the stuff of Brothers Grimm but I bet there's plenty folk sitting up at night trying to figure out the ending!

Dovetail Software Blogs looks at the same problem from the other side of the looking glass. This article warns "development must never lose sight of the users" and in so doing points to the truth, "Knowledge Management Is No Good Without the Knowledge." Its amazing what a few months will do for a buzz word like crowdsourcing.

Shelly D. Farnham makes a lot of sense as she considers social networking platforms. Scroll around Wagglelabs.com for lots of insight and pathable your way toward the soul partner you always wanted.

Crowdsourcing in Germany

Within a few days of last week's post I'd received several offers to provide a digest of crowdsourcing's development in Germany. In fact by the next morning I'd received an email from Markus Pöehlmann, who operates the German crowdsourcing blog, crowdwisdom. Markus ginned up the following summary. Kudos and great thanks to Markus for the prompt, informative reply. (If anyone from France, Spain or regions unmentioned feels like using the following as a model, I wholeheartedly encourage it.) There's lots of interesting items here—the adaptability of the Threadless model, for one—so I hope Markus' excellent work triggers some good old international dialogue in the comments section. Here's Markus:

There is a small but active community in Germany that discusses crowdsourcing initiatives, both locally and internationally. I‘ll give an overview and mention some of the projects, companies and people who aim to tap the wisdom the crowds. There are of course more crowdsourcing initiatives than I can mention – I thus focus on a few well-known but also on some less famous projects.

Design
Many of the most popular crowdsourcing initiatives arose within the t-shirt and design community. There are a significant number of true innovators and early adopters that become quite popular in Germany. Among them are:

• German start-up Spreadshirt (dig the logo, above--Jeff) is one of the most innovative crowdsourcing initiatives (similar to threadless.com in the US) and initiated (among others) the Open Logo project and the Derby design contest.
• Cajong is one of the pioneers for t-shirt design contests.
• A Better Tomorrow features design contests and hosts an active design community.
• French design contest start-up LaFraise was acquired by Spreadshirt and now also offers a German site.

Much more following the jump: