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Hardcover
Publisher: Crown Business
Format: Bargain Price
“The amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing corrects that—but in doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction.”
—From Crowdsourcing
First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, “crowdsourcing” describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise—it’s talented, creative, and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today’s technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It’s a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you’ve got the job.
But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable.
Jeff Howe delves into both the positive and negative consequences of this intriguing phenomenon. Through extensive reporting from the front lines of this revolution, he employs a brilliant array of stories to look at the economic, cultural, business, and political implications of crowdsourcing. How were a bunch of part-time dabblers in finance able to help an investment company consistently beat the market? Why does Procter & Gamble repeatedly call on enthusiastic amateurs to solve scientific and technical challenges? How can companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless employ just a handful of people, yet generate millions of dollars in revenue every year? The answers lie within these pages.
The blueprint for crowdsourcing originated from a handful of computer programmers who showed that a community of like-minded peers could create better products than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Jeff Howe tracks the amazing migration of this new model of production, showing the potential of the Internet to create human networks that can divvy up and make quick work of otherwise overwhelming tasks. One of the most intriguing ideas of Crowdsourcing is that the knowledge to solve intractable problems—a cure for cancer, for instance—may already exist within the warp and weave of this infinite and, as yet, largely untapped resource. But first, Howe proposes, we need to banish preconceived notions of how such problems are solved.
The very concept of crowdsourcing stands at odds with centuries of practice. Yet, for the digital natives soon to enter the workforce, the technologies and principles behind crowdsourcing are perfectly intuitive. This generation collaborates, shares, remixes, and creates with a fluency and ease the rest of us can hardly understand. Crowdsourcing, just now starting to emerge, will in a short time simply be the way things are done.
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| A New Type Of "Sourcing" |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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With all the controversy surrounding outsourcing the real concern should be with "Crowdsourcing" or the willingness of international amateurs to accomplish tasks for little or no money, sometimes with quality equaling that or exceeding professionals. One may ask why people would do this or even if this phenomenon is true. I will not provide the motivations, as this is a large part of the book, but suffice it to say it is true. Crowdsourcing is a great assessment of this trend and outlines in detail what exactly crowdsourcing is, provides real world examples of crowdsourcing done both well and poorly, and explains why you as an individual, company, or industry should care about this trend. Crowdsourcing may take some time to complete as at times it reads as a business school text, however by the conclusion my guess is that you will find it to be worthwhile and find yourself better off than when you started.
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| Buzz-Up iz-Us |
| Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 |
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Mr. Howe's own company purports to leverage the use of buzz and forums to create branding. It's a nice
idea, but sTILL requires a tremendous amount of media support which he claims can be superceded by blogging. Another marketer trying to make a name for himself by coming up with a buzzwerd...and a "book."
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| Excellent Overall Treatise on the Influence and Power of Crowdsourcing |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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From the positives of crowdsourcing and in its influence on business (the creation of Google with citation information being a key example) to its "dark side" of mob rule and mass mediocrity (the creation of Google can be used as the same key example), Howe very effectively explores by analysis and representation the phenomena of crowdsourcing as its "hyper fueled" by the World Wide Web. Howe effectively outlines the transformation that crowdsourcing on the Web has created, from business and the means of production, to information distribution, to finance, what factors caused this transformation and where this may lead in the future. Finally, Howe projects the future, when the "digital natives" (those children now coming of age in the Internet era), supplant the "digital immigrants" (the rest of us), and, reminds us of the Pew Internet & American Life Project study that determined that, as of 2007, 93% of all American 12 to 17 year olds are regular Internet users, and, of those, 64% are creating content among themselves on the Web, and finally, the majority of those content creators are creating content in crowdsourcing, social network type environments. All and all, this is one of the most worthwhile books on the every expanding, and talked about, topic, and is a "must read" for anyone interested in the emerging crowdsourcing evolution.
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| Good Framework for Contribution Business Models |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Easy and entertaining read with great examples of how contribution / crowdsourcing models are making an impact on businesses and web-based business models. It stimulates thinking about how these concepts may be applied to any range of contexts, and the power of the collective contribution.
It is organized from a historical perspective to the present with a look to the future, and discusses vivid examples in each section.
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| Must Read Book about a Significant Trend |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Jeff Howe covers one of the most significant trends enabled by the Internet: crowdsourcing, or the practice of engaging the masses in achieving an objective. I think Howe's argument is convincing that this trend will become a significant way of doing business. The book has great examples of both successful and failed crowdsourcing attempts, and describes the critical elements that comprise crowdsourcing. Although crowdsourcing will not be ubiquitous - clearly there are some products and services that will not benefit from outsourcing to the masses - there will be increased and improved uses of crowdsourcing in business. I would have liked to see some examples of crowdsourcing in government, but I suppose there aren't many out there yet. This book is a great addition to the current works that study and analyze the way new technologies, particularly the internet, are permanently changing the way we play and work.
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