Updata

Despite the lack of activity on the crowdsourcing blog, there's much afoot in the crowdsourcing world. First off, the publication date of the Crowdsourcing Book is now August 26th. This is great and terrifying news. The fall is prime publishing season, the time when houses release all their biggest books. It's also smack dab between the Democratic and Republican conventions and the general election in November. Conventional wisdom holds that politics sucks all the air out of the room, so the fact Crown is confident enough to put my book up against the tide is an honor. I hope the book will perform well enough to meet their expectations.

I've spent much of the last month tying up final loose ends on the book and on the road doing more speaking engagements (Amsterdam—again—Austria and the Jersey Coast!). But at last the book is totally and completely done. I can't say I'm quite ready to write the sequel (or any other book), but it has been an immensely gratifying experience, both on personal and creative levels.

Finally, a bit of bad news. We've had to put the Crowdsourcing Appendix on hold for the time being. What this means is that we won't be running an appendix with reader comments in the first edition. We simply didn't have enough time to publish the rest of the excerpts and collect the comments into a publishable form. I'm to blame for this—I should have started the program a few months earlier. It's far from naught, however: The comments, and additional ones to be solicited following publication of the book, will be published in a subsequent edition of the crowdsourcing book, either in the form of an appendix or (as would be my druthers), in the marginalia, a la Clive Thompson's piece in Wired last March.