I Called, You Answered

A little over a month ago I asked if everyone studying some aspect of crowdsourcing would speak up and make themselves known on this blog. What a response! For months I've been telling amazed relatives that a handful of people are actually out there researching this thing, calling it crowdsourcing, and receiving institutional support to do so. (If any of you had ever seen what a goofball I was in my youth, you'd understand why this fact surprises and shocks my family.)  Now I can tell them that close to 40 people are studying crowdsourcing, customer innovation, social filters, et. al.

Now what to do with all this group intelligence? My original suggestion was that I would finally turn Crowdsourcing.com into what I always intended it to be, a venue for pre-peer-review publication of all manner of scholarship that fell under the crowdsourcing umbrella. But earlier today Alan Booker, one of Crowdsourcing.com's most persevering and erudite contributors, suggested putting it on Twine instead. If you believe the hype (and I've no reason not to), Twine is the first consumer application to employ the semantic Web, or what's being called Web 3.0. It's a social networking/group working application that automatically creates its own links, tags and other forms of meta-data. I've probably mussed up the explanation, but Tim O'Reilly does a more than passable job of explaining how Twine works. It's the brainchild of Nova Spivak, who launched Twine earlier today at Web 2.0.

I think this might be a fine idea, though I have my reservations. I'm inclined to wonder if we shouldn't let the early adopters work out the inevitable bugs in what is, after all, a fairly ambitious and relatively untested application. However, I'm just one voice of many here. So I put the question to my fellow researchers and students: We all want to connect and explore and critique each other's ideas. Do we take the established tact of gathering around a blog, or explore the (somewhat scary) new world of the semantic Web? Start your voting ...