Assigment Zero

The new trend in gaining collective opinions and work from large groups of people is called crowdsourcing. Wikipedia is great example of this. While this may seem like the eventual fallout from James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds it is none the less rapidly creating a stir in all walks of life. Surowiecki also contributed to Assignment Zero.

Wired magazine did a large editorial piece researching how crowdsourcing is affecting people of different lifestyles. The project was called Assignment Zero. The assignment looks at crowdsourcing through art, government, business, today’s thinkers, and other topics.

Crowdsourcing can have many implications Yochai Benkler, an NYU professor an expert on the subject believes, “[This] new mode of production [using crowdsourcing] holds the potential to help address what he calls "the core political values of liberal societies—individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice.”

A cool t-shirt website (which I've used) which leverages crowdsourcing is Threadless Tees. HERE is an article from Assignment Zero on them.

There is also an article in this week’s Fortune magazine on the review site, yelp.com. Yelp also takes advantage of crowdsourcing to create a site with reviews on restaurants, nightlife, shopping, spas, and etc. Look for yelp.com to explode in popularity.