Crowdsourcing Links

My ClickZ article this morning is about Crowdsourcing and its implications for marketers and advertisers. I tried to make a few points in there, the primary being that Crowdsourcing is a very cool new term for a fairly well-established set of practices. The core idea is opening up your project to the crowd, giving any interested person the ability to actually mold your product.

Rather than load the load up the article with links, I figured I'd post a few here:

• The Crowdsourcing Blog is written by Jeff Howe, who also wrote the original story in Wired about Crowdsourcing.
  
• SETI@Home was probably the first instance of Crowdsourcing that caught people's attention. There's a good history lesson on it at Wikipedia.
• Trendwatching has a great resource called "Customer-Made", with links to a number of examples of what we're talking about. My absolute favorite is Orange's Talking Point. In some sense, this is just a survey tool. But it is so elegantly desinged and implemented that it has the potential to attract a lot of interest.

Crowdsourcing is definitely a new, new term and a lot of things could potentially be caught up in its wake. In my mind, this is an evolution in CGM (consumer generated media)...not so much on the consumer side, but rather on the corporate side. That is, CGM is a fact of corporate life. You don't have any choice to make about it occuring. Crowdsourcing is the view from the corporate side. That, you do have a choice about.

That is, Crowdsourcing is a business strategy. It is a decision to use the activity happening in the consumer space in a very directed way. This is not necessarily about researching your brand (although it certainly could be). Rather it is about product development. The product group has scientists, designers, chefs and other experts. The marketing department has the consumer. That's a pretty powerful asset to bring to the design table, and one that interactive/Internet focused marketers should be making more of.