Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Crowdsourcing Secrets

If you haven't taken a look at PostSecret, go. The project is billed as a community art project where people mail in their secrets on a postcard, hence the name PostSecret. The guy who started the project has put out two books full of secret postcards; the whole project is a beautiful representation of crowdsourcing. It's not the freshest news in the crowdsourcing world, but the site/blog is a good read.

In a similiar vein, Found magazine features items, notes, pictures, etc. that people have "found" and submitted to the ezine. I like the idea, but after looking at a few of the submissions, I found myself wondering how many of these "finds" were put together and scanned by a graphic artist. I found myself thinking, "fake," just as I do when I watch America's Funniest Home Videos....hey, why doesn't anyone ever give some props to AFHV as a pioneer of the crowdsourcing movement?

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Crowdsourced Kitties

A guy's in the airport, comes up with an idea for a book about cats, drops two task into crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk, and by the time he leaves the airport the responses are rolling in. Check out his blog to see how the project became a 38 page coffee table book at his blog.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Crowdsourcing Flouride

Proctor & Gamble announced it will look to the crowd for the next tagline for the Crest toothpaste line. Beginning September 15th, interested individuals can submit a 10 word tagline via YouTube. Video? Sounds a bit gimmicky, but in true "World's Funniest Home Video" fashion, I am sure we will see a crowdsourced slew 0f taglines, lots of kittens, and plenty of cute little kids pitching the tagline.

More importantly, what are the long-term implications for the advertising industry? Will crowdsourcing compete with Saatchi and Saatchi for big-time ad budgets in the future? Doubtful, but take a look just down the creative road and witness the fracas that upstarts like Crowdspring and 99designs are creating in the graphic design industry. Without a doubt, ad industry professionals will start squawking about amateurs creating ads if we see a few more of these crowdsourcing experiments pop up.

Like my pappy used to tell me, Disruption's a bitch, ain't it?