K Sawyer Paul of Gredunza Press reviewed Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business. He had this to say about it:

The cynical viewpoint of the modern Internet is that there are lots and lots of tiny businesses making millions of the backs of the masses who happily upload their videos, photos, documents and opinions. The sites then make tons of money placing ads next to all this free content. Crowdsourcing explains the dos and don’ts of running a business like iStockphoto and Digg. What would have been nice is maybe some advice for the majority of us who use these sites instead of the people who own them, but I can’t criticize the book for its focus.

So, for those who do want to cash in on this particular model, this book is quite useful. It paints a fairly lush picture of the landscape, and has a way of focusing on the winners far more than the losers (in fact, there isn’t a single example that doesn’t lead to fortune, even after initial failure). And though it offers no bullet-point solution system, a few nuggets of advice pour through in between the lines: make your process transparent, give the contributors a sense of ownership, and don’t place money as the most important aspect of the community. The big no-no appears to just be censorship. The main example author Jeff Howe uses is the Digg “riot” of 2007, when the owners censored submissions that contained the HD-DVD hack under threat of legal action, which prompted users of Digg just kept uploading the story until the owners buckled.

The censorship question ties directly into the sense of ownership, which Howe explains on page 15: “What unites all successful crowdsourcing efforts is a deep commitment to the community…. The crowd wants to feel a sense of ownership over its creations, and is keenly aware when it is being exploited.”

As to why this crowd exists at all, Howe points at the amount of overeducated, under-stimulated people there are in the workforce. The number of university-educated people has increased dramatically in the last fifty years, but the number of intellectually stimulating jobs has only increased so much. This has left a large population of incredibly smart people figuratively breaking rocks with other rocks. They then spend their free time doing awesome things like building user-generated encyclopedias and determining what is and isn’t worthwhile news. As Howe states on page 39, “The result is that a large number of people are performing their most meaningful, rewarding labor away from the workforce.”

Howe explains the best possible benefit of crowdsourcing is in product evaluations, essentially making an enthusiast crowd into another round of R&D. From page 148: “Forward-thinking companies are tapping this emerging well of intellectual capital and changing the face of R&D in the process.” But Howe doesn’t at all touch the downside of that argument: the first round of enthusiast purchasers of any product can essentially become test subjects. This sort of thing happens all the time, from Apple charging $600 for the first iPhone and $200 for the one a year after, which had far more going for it.

But that criticism is about the users. Apple profited huge off using the crowd, because these enthusiasts essentially paid to be beta testers. This book is about becoming the people who subject your community to that sort of thing. It’s too bad, because I really wanted at least a chapter on being on the other side of this coin, but people on that side could do well by looking at Crushing It by Gary Vaynerchuck.

Probably the most useful piece of advice gleaned from the book comes from the story of video game developer Valve, who’s game Half Life was modified by a teenager into a little game called Counter-Strike. Instead of suing the teenager into oblivion, Valve bought the rights and gave him a job. The advice from this is to trust the crowd, even with your own intellectual property, for they may know what to do with it better than you. This is a heavy hurdle, as it suggests scrapping your legal team and letting your fan base do what they like with your product. And while this is great advice for the majority of new IP’s, this sort of thing cannot work in every case. Sometimes you have to sue the kid, and this book doesn’t tell you that.

To summarize, this book is focused entirely on the ownership side of crowdsourcing, on becoming a wrangler of the social upload and finding ways of profiting off the casual consumption and submissions of millions. For people looking to get into that racket, this is a must-buy.

__________
K Sawyer Paul and Éisee Sylvester are co-owners of Gredunza Press. They assist new authors in finding information, advice, and the best routes to modern publishing and provide publishing services that will improve the marketability of their books.

» Read more and comment