Crowdsourcing

Miscellany: The Book Tour Begins ... And Two Reviews

I leave tomorrow morning for San Francisco and Seattle. I'll be speaking a few book stores, stopping by Microsoft and recording a segment for Dr. Moira Gunn's excellent show, Tech Nation. In reality, I've been giving talks about the concepts in the book for a few years now, though it picked up considerably this summer. I should, by all rights, be sick of the drill, but I'm not. I endlessly futz with my schpiel, adding new elements and taking out any that bore me. For the last talk I created a 60-slide Keynote presentation. Now I'm not sure whether I like it. Tomorrow I'll be at Kepler's (details here) in Menlo Park, just south of San Francisco, and I'm thinking of doing a straight reading from the book, something I've yet to do.

A few reviews of crowdsourcing have come over the transom in the last few days. The New York Post gave it a thoughtful write-up, as did the Miami Herald. They're both positive, though the Post piece is less a review than a meditation. I'd love to say I ignore my reviews, but it'd be a lie. In fact I read them breathlessly, heart racing. So much for staying detached. In other self-glorifying news, the Independent in London has excerpted my book in its Tuesday edition.

Finally, here's what's getting all the Tweets today: A piece on CNET about Peugot's recent campaign to crowdsource a car design. Sexy pics!

Reading, Writing and Arithmetic

A fair number of you have rightly wondered whether I've been abducted by aliens or deported to Moldova. I'm happy to report the correct answer is ... Neither! In fact I'm ensconced at my cubicle in Wired's New York office pounding away at my particular version of the three R's: Reading books related to crowdsourcing, writing a book that is, I hope, all about crowdsourcing, and working on a deceptively simple mathematic formula: 3+1=4. According to this equation, our family will soon welcome another arrival. My wife is due on September 10—a boy, if the sonogram is to be believed. The tricky part is that I've been assured that a second child introduces a disproportional quantity of chaos to the household, so perhaps the common formula contains a flaw. Could 3+1 actually equal 5 or 6? I've actually been told the chaos increases exponentially, but as 1X1 = 1, that can't quite be true.

But impending labor doesn't quite excuse my silence in August. I know lots of writers who use their blogs as a tool to help them with their books. I offer them my admiration and absolute bafflement. I'm having trouble wrestling this topic to the ground while maintaining anything like a normal sleep schedule (Wired's editor, Chris Anderson, once advise me that "4 AM is your friend; the Web is your enemy." He spoke the truth.), much less wasting precious words on my blog. That said, I am in the thick of it at the moment. Perhaps once I've crested the mountain am on the descent I'll be able to enjoy the luxury of posting to crowdsourcing.com.

Which isn't to say you won't hear from me from time to time, but I do want to apologize in advance for more month-long absences. Until then, please give my rival blog, the crowdsourcing directory, a read (I'm a Shark; he's the Jet, for anyone who's wondering). I'm regularly impressed with it, in those rare moments I'm able to read it.

Hope you all had a good summer ...