Crowdsourcing

IBM's Many Eyes

I have a Word doc on my computer titled "Rules." It started with a "Rules of the New Labor Pool" sidebar that ran alongside my original Wired story on crowdsourcing and has been in a state of constant revision ever since. One rule that's been a mainstay is Be Humble. It's time for the doctor to take his own medicine. Alan Booker, a teacher at Washington College in Chicago, has been faithfully sending me daily crowdsourcing updates from the day the Wired article hit newsstands. It's high time his contributions were acknowledged, and some of his more choice comments upgraded to a post. Here's Alan:

Here is a new IBM Beta site, Many Eyes. A site where you can see your data visualizations and multiple people can access them for a collaborative experience. The amount of interactivity is pretty interesting, many layers and highly developed.

“Investigate the social and communicative value of information visualization.”
Alan.

Crowdsourcing: The Book

I was telling a friend the other day that the nature of book writing had changed. Back in the day a writer would receive a commission to write a book, hole up for a year or so and emerge with a near-finished product. The book might be based on an article that originated in a newspaper or magazine, but the works were entirely discrete. Today an article can become the basis for a blog, which then drives further articles, all of which become fodder for the lecture circuit, feedback from which reappears on the blog. If the subject strikes a rich, deep vein, then all this informs a book, which itself is heavily influenced by a continuing discourse facilitated by the blog and further articles. This sounds way more fun than sequestering oneself away in a garret for 12-plus months. The point is that the medium isn't the message anymore. The message is the message, and the medium is merely a delivery mechanism.

Now it's time to put this grand theorizing to the test. I've been developing a book proposal on crowdsourcing for the last several months, a process that reached a happy conclusion last Thursday when Crown Publishing Group bought the rights to publish the book, which is slated to hit shelves in the Spring of 2008. It's my first book and I should probably be more nervous than I am. Instead I feel a sense of giddy anticipation, like the feeling I get when a big trout starts feeding on mayflies just within casting distance (there's surely a more universal metaphor I could use, but hey, this is what comes to mind). One of the immediate effects of the deal is that I'll have much more time to work on this blog, which has been a guilty pleasure up to now. Naturally, I'll be involving contributors to the blog in the writing process, although I'm still mulling exactly how that will take place. And just as naturally, I'll expect you all to give me ideas on that count. I'm sure I won't be disappointed. Thanks to you all, and keep reading ...

Commercializing Community, Continued

Well, Bruce's first installment was a smash, at least by my standards, which is to say, it generated some excellent, thought-provoking comments. The topic Bruce touches on adroitly, and which readers have appropriately picked up on, is the role of passion in community production systems. That's a fancy way of saying that people will only do something if they care deeply about it, and anyone monetizing their contributions had damn well better be aware of it. Community members aren't employees--they're partners, and need to be treated as such. Actually, I'm not sure this applies in every case, but I'll save my parsing for the comments section. Here's Bruce's last three rules in the essay:

4) Ask the Right Questions

With a community-based marketplace, this tenet, as simple as it sounds is even more crucial than in offline ventures. It’s crucial because communities are made of people who are deeply attached to what happens in what feels like family. One wrong move can have repercussions that reverberate throughout the network for weeks and months to come.  So we try to treat big decisions about iStockphoto with as much care as we would major personal choices. Examples include; Is it Fair?; Is it Best; Who is Going to Like this Decision?; Who Is Going to Hate It, and Why? Then we refine choices based on the answers to these questions in order to come to a solid decision that will make most of the people happy.

5) Listen, Even When it Hurts

Anyone who wants to start a social network has to be committed to deeply knowing the vast majority of their members. That means a lot of late nights and countless, chronic, hand-numbing e-mails. For example, I recently returned from a week’s absence to find 6,700 e-mails from iStockphoto members waiting for me. It took me four days, but I read every one, and responded personally to most of them.
Other CEOs might have a secretary weed things out, especially the unpleasant challenges or questions. To be authentic, I need to stay deeply connected to the community. In every social group like this there are people who might appear to be critics. Don't mistake their passion for conflict. I try to write a personal note to every one of these people, because they often have very important ideas. If you listen, the community will give you the best ideas.

6) Change at the Right Speed for the Right Reasons

By staying connected deeply with the community I keep my finger on the pulse of what new features or modifications are needed. It's important to provide continual and constant progress. Change needs to be introduced at a pace that people can absorb, while the core and essence of the community and site features remain the same.

Commercializing Community

I liked Bruce Livingstone five minutes into my first conversation with him. Bruce is the founder and CEO of iStockPhoto.com, to my knowledge the first and largest of the so-called "microstocks." (To see the role microstock has played in the development of crowdsourcing, read here.) For one thing, Bruce likes to fly fish, and while it's possible there are untrustworthy types out there who also fly fish, I haven't met them. Second, he spent years touring the West Coast as the singer of a punk rock band, evidence that Bruce appreciates the finer things in life. But what I find most winning about Bruce is that he's an accidental entrepreneur. A designer and photographer, he started iStock because he didn't have the money to launch a traditional stock company. So he gave his photos away, and found a community of other talented people willing to give their photos away to. The value, as many content companies are still struggling to understand, wasn't necessarily in the thing itself.

I've got a special treat today. Bruce has written something for us here at Crowdsourcing.Com, a two-part meditation on how to make money off community. I think this question has become increasingly important to everyone in the culture industry, as communities have begun to replace the company as an organizing unit of labor. This is still terra incognita, which makes Bruce a pioneer of sorts. Without further ado, here's part one of Bruce's essay:

Is Social Networking Sustainable? Thoughts on Building a Social Network with Staying Power ...

The phenomenon of entertaining media sharing sites may be devouring itself with hundreds of flavor of the same offering. While advertising can be very successful as a model, for long-term success, it works best triangulated with other revenue methods, such as monetizing the user-generated content itself, or smart co-marketing agreements.With more than one million passionate members, including more than 33,000 contributing artists and an image or video file downloaded somewhere in the world every three seconds, iStockphoto has effectively turned community into commerce. Here are six principles I've adhered to as CEO of iStockphoto:

1) Put the Passion First

Here are a couple of the most notable quotes I've heard from iStock members: “iStock was built on passion, not on dollars” and "iStock is not a full-time job, but a lifelong passion." Threads and connections of people with common interests and shared passion for visual communication built the roots of iStock. The economy of micropayment stock followed.

2) Virtual Community is Only Sustained by Real World Gain

Social networking and social media sites are hot topics right now just like the mid-nineties when having a Web site made you "e"-enabled and cutting-edge. Natural selection will subsume the weakest players in this phenomenon. As competition grows, I believe the most economically successful social networks will be niche-focused with offerings that fill a real-world business need. For example, iStockphoto makes value-priced royalty-free images, illustrations and video available to a broad market of people who couldn’t afford great visual content before. We also give artists direct access to more than one million potential clients, more than they could ever reach alone. So, everybody stands to make money, or save money, while sharing and learning about our shared passions, pictures and video.

3) Build a Community to Fill the Gap, Not Follow the Leader

When I was a young punk, I thought I would pursue a career in music and spent years in bands and playing in dirty nightclubs. One day a kid showed up and could play EVERY instrument better than I ever could. I thought, ‘This kid is 10 years younger than me, and he’s kicking my ass. I’m not going to compete where I can’t win.’ That idea has guided many of my career decisions and I think it is a good rule.  So many people are trying to compete in social networking segments where there is already a clear winner. Why?  I say, look for the areas where no one is providing a solution, and create one. Then innovate like hell, stay fresh and keep growing. With iStockphoto, we saw a need for value-priced imagery for designers working on a budget or small business owners, and we filled that need. Others have come after us, but no one does it as well.

Tune in tomorrow for the rest of Bruce's essay ...