Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
Are you ready for the next chapter of Crowdsourcing? Jeff Howe (the man who’s 2006 Wired article coined the word Crowdsourcing) new book is coming out next week: Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. Tthe book follows the crowdsourcing trend and discovers how it is revolutionizing business, internet, and commerce.
Crowdsourcing has already taken hold according to Howe. Communities are coming together to take on jobs that were once preformed by staff. The result online communities like iStockPhoto, Threadless, Crowdspring and Innocentive have flourished. Other “brick and mortar” companies like Dell and Procter and Gamble have launched crowdsourcing sites to capitalize on this trend.
Jeff’s book will look at:
- How four fundamental developments–a renaissance of amateurism, the emergence of open source software movement, the increasing availability of the tools of production, and the rise of vibrant online communities have made crowdsourcing inevitable
- Crowdfunding: The way the crowd’s collective pocketbook is being used to create new ways of financing everything from micro-credit organizations to would-be rock stars
- 10 Rules of Crowdsourcing A roadmap on how to implement the principles of Crowdsourcing into your own enterprise
Open source software revealed a fundamental truth about humans that had gone largely unnoticed until the connectivity of the internet brought it into high relief: labor can be organized more efficiently in the context of community than it can in the context of a corporation.
– Jeff Howe, from the introduction of Crowdsourcing
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Howe is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where he covers the entertainment industry among other subjects. Before coming to Wired he was a senior editor at Inside.com and a writer at the Village Voice. In his fifteen years as a journalist he has traveled around the world working on stories ranging from the impending water crisis in Central Asia to the implications of gene patenting. He has also written for US News & World Report, Time magazine, The Washington Post, Mother Jones and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.
August 21st, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Thanks so much for mentioning http://www.crowdspring.com in your post. We’re really excited to read Jeff Howe’s upcoming book. We started researching what has ultimately resulted in crowdSPRING around the time that Jeff wrote his instrumental article in Wired about crowdsourcing, and we’ve been huge fans since.
Best,
Ross Kimbarovsky
co-Founder
http://www.crowdspring.com