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Crowdsourcing: A One-Way Ticket to Blah. It's come to this: Ad agencies, in a push to get hip with the kids, lower their price points, and produce better ideas, seem to be piling onto the crowdsourcing bandwagon. But can crowdsourcing produce anything more than mediocre work? Evangelists for the trend say that crowdsourcing opens the competitive field, to talent that would otherwise go overlooked. Typically, you offer a prize, open the gates, and let the best idea win.

You get more ideas, so some of them are bound to be good, right? The list of ad agencies trying their hand at this is growing: As The Times reports, Bartle Bogle Hegarty of London is teaming with TalentHouse; some Crispin alums started Victors and Spoils; there's also Crowdspring and Genius Rocket. You can see why ad-pros would resent this idea: These contests usually don't compensate all the participants.

Most of these new crowdsourcing ventures think they have a way around this. But can you really get great work this way? 'Crowdsourcing' gets companies cheap help online. By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY SAN FRANCISCO — Penny-pinching companies are hiring specialists to plumb the vast resources of the Web in search of cheap expert help. The concept, called "crowdsourcing," is gaining momentum among businesses, non-profits and individuals who are getting work done at a fraction of the normal cost.

And with more people online with ultrafast Internet connections, companies have a vast database of experts to choose from. Why pay an ad agency or employees millions of dollars, the reasoning goes, if you can offer a prize and tap the talents of experts and amateurs worldwide? "We're turning idle time into income," says Jordan Ritter, founder of CloudCrowd, one of dozens of crowdsourcing services. Crowdsourcing is being used on everything from a Super Bowl ad for Doritos to improvements in movie recommendations on Netflix. For example, XLNTads acts as a middleman between major brands such as Procter & Gamble and Anheuser-Busch and its network of 15,000 videographers.

GeniusRocket: The First Curated Crowdsourcing Company | Welcome to the New GeniusRocket. Crowdsourcing. Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D. By Jeff HowePage 1 of 4 next » 1. The Professional Story Tools Story Images Click thumbnails for full-size image: Claudia Menashe needed pictures of sick people. In October 2004, she ran across a stock photo collection by Mark Harmel, a freelance photographer living in Manhattan Beach, California.

The National Health Museum has grand plans to occupy a spot on the National Mall in Washington by 2012, but for now it’s a fledgling institution with little money. After several weeks of back-and-forth, Menashe emailed Harmel to say that, regretfully, the deal was off. iStockphoto, which grew out of a free image-sharing exchange used by a group of graphic designers, had undercut Harmel by more than 99 percent. He can’t, of course. It took a while for Harmel to recognize what was happening. Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a sourcing model in which individuals or organizations obtain goods and services. These services include ideas and finances, from a large, relatively open and often rapidly-evolving group of internet users; it divides work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. The word crowdsourcing itself is a portmanteau of crowd and outsourcing, and was coined in 2005.[1][2][3][4] As a mode of sourcing, crowdsourcing existed prior to the digital age (i.e.

"offline").[5] There are major differences between crowdsourcing and outsourcing. Some forms of crowdsourcing, such as in "idea competitions" or "innovation contests" provide ways for organizations to learn beyond the "base of minds" provided by their employees (e.g. Definitions[edit] The term "crowdsourcing" was coined in 2005 by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, editors at Wired, to describe how businesses were using the Internet to "outsource work to the crowd",[1] which quickly led to the portmanteau "crowdsourcing.

" Co: collective. Victors & Spoils.