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?

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.

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?

Spot Us: Crowdfunded Journalism

Spot Us is a non-profit organization that encourages community-funded journalism. Spot Us was chosen as a winner this week in the Knight News Challenge, taking home a $340,000 grant/prize.

Whats the scoop? With a focus on the community level, journalists and local residents will pitch stories, while Spot Us will seek funding from the crowd for potential stories. If enough funding is raised for a particular story, a journalist will be hired to cover the issue.

More information can be found at www.digidave.org

Carrotmob.org: Green Crowdsourcing

I just watched the 10 minute video at the Carrotmob website and I was truly impressed at the creativity of this crowdsourcing effort. What do they do? Well, it's a mouthful, but here goes. Carrotmob organizes a swarm of consumers on some random morning to go shopping at a store that has agreed to put a specified portion of every purchase towards becoming a more environmentally-friendly store ( 22% of revenues towards greening the store in this case). Carrotmobbers purchased about $9k worth of product, enabling the participating business to totally redo their lighting system and make some upgrades to their refrigeration units. As well, the carrotmobbers donated 366 pounds of food to the SF Food Bank.

This is an interesting concept, it would be nice to see it fly.

Knewsroom: Turning on a Dime

I noticed the other day that Kluster, a crowdsourcing-based start-up, changed its business model. The new service from Kluster, called Knewsroom, is an crowdsourced - you guessed it- news service. Members submit topics and the crowd "invests" in what topic or story they feel is most newsworthy. If a story you invest in is featured in the next day's edition, you will earn Knewsroom currency based on the size of your original investment. If you create original content and the crowd deems it worthy, you can get paid $150 on a Mastercard debit card. The problem I see, very early on, is that the crowd seems to be investing heavily in the stories with the most votes. For instance, a story on ABC had 19 votes and a story on XYZ had 2 votes yesterday late in the voting day. With such a commanding lead by ABC, why even bother voting for XYZ?

I found a video on Crowdsourcethis.com that features Kluster founder, Ben Kaufmann. He seems pretty open about the fact that Kluster burned through $1m in 7 weeks, requiring them to change the business model.

Cambrianhouse: A Crowdsourcing Foreclosure

Interesting couple of days.

1. The Godfather of the crowdsourcing movement, Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine, made an appeal to the crowd on May 12th via his Crowdsourcing.com blog. It seems the writer responsible for coining the term crowdsourcing is having some trouble getting the crowd involved in/commenting on his blog. It seems that Jeff made an offer to get published in his book back in January. The original post yielded only four comments. His May 12th post yielded the same.

2. Yesterday, Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch pushed Cambrian House into the deep end with his post, When Crowdsourcing Fails: Cambrian House Headed to the Deadpool. It seems that $7.5m wasn't enough to keep the CambrianHouse from going into foreclosure.

Crowdfunding - A Movement?

Crowdfunding (n.) - describes the collective donation of funds, usually via the Internet, by a group of people united by a common cause.

Is Crowdfunding really a "movement" or is it just a creative way to introduce, market, and fund a new business via the Internet? Better yet, does crowdfunding present a viable funding method for someone with a business idea and limited capital to go out and virally market a low-cost, web-based prospectus (i.e. a 3 page website that asks for money). Is it just easier to put together a quick website, come up with a YouTube video, and ask the crowd for $50 for an annual membership? Have we become that lazy in the wake of the 2nd dotcom bust?

Is crowdfunding a viable alternative to traditional VC funding? Is it merely an opportunity for all the dreamers and schemers to toss some ideas on a digital cocktail napkin and test out their ideas? Will it become a viable playing field for Scam 2.0? I mean, come on, we have people trying to crowdfund bums onto the Forbes 500 who are raising more money than some of the "legit" crowdfunding outfits out there.

Is crowdfunding just a re-packaged tipping point methodology that focuses on dipping into members wallets as opposed to a collective effort to create, market and manage new and exciting technologies and products? Do we really need to call this a movement?

I do know this - I am not that interested in the academic aspects of crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, crowdmanaging, wisdom of crowds, etc. - all of that can be left to Jeff Howe and the social media marketers of the world. I like to track how these "projects" work. I like bookmarking them after I have read about them on Springwise or in Wired. I like to see what media outlets pick up the stories. I like to see some journalist in Scotland use his platform to goad the crowd into buying a football club. I like to go to the Cambrian House website and see what kind of punctuation has been used in the latest round of "idears" on the site.

I am a crowd troll.