Social. Why commercial outfits can't get Wikis to work. (Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Nowadays, the all-powerful Web user, recently anointed as Time's Person of the Year, is both creator and consumer of every last bit of content at some of the Web's fastest-growing destinations.
Witness the success of Flickr (the photo-sharing site), YouTube (the video-sharing site), Deli.cio.us (the bookmark-sharing site) and Wikipedia (the knowledge-sharing site). This naturally has gotten a lot of large companies interested in the idea of outsourcing their content to the Web crowd, or "crowdsourcing. " At the beginning of February, for instance, Penguin Books - one of the biggest names in the global publishing industry - launched a month-long, publicity-soaked project that attempted to get Web surfers to create a novel.
The idea seemed destined to belong in the Web 2.0 hall of fame (or shame), as the most audacious (or most arrogant) use of crowdsourcing ever. And eighteen months ago, the L.A. 101 Fabulous Freebies. There's never been a better time to be a cheapskate.
Free utilities? We've got 'em. Want a full-fledged image editor? A few gigabytes of mail storage?