Last night I saw a presentation on ‘crowdsourcing‘ by Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine at Apexart. The exhibition which is on at the gallery shows art that uses crowdsourcing as a principle. A very funny work is Aaron Koblin’s ‘The sheep market‘. He used the mechanical turk to have people draw sheep for 0.02$ a piece. Appearently some of them did not like it when they heard, that their sheep were used in an art project – it seems that most people prefer to be exploited by corporations than by artists.

Jeff Howe talked about how the pressure on certain professions is already getting quite big because of sourcing out to the (cheap) crowd. Examples are stock photographers but also journalists who have competition not only in blogs, but also in comments on news websites and amazon reviews. I recently read that photographers who work for Bildzeitung were not amused, that the paper pays more for an amateur photo that gets printed than for their contractors’ photos.

As one example Howe also mentioned Second Life, where users have designed all of the virtual world. I just interviewed Cory Ondreijka, leading developer of Second Life for Game Face magazine and he makes clear that they largely depend on user generated content: Second Life’s residents make the world attractive! Creating interactive content is incredibly expensive and risky using conventional approaches. Even middleware approaches that claim to reduce cost fail because the real cost lies in content development. In Second Life you have access
to thousands and thousands of world class developers, backed by an emerging ecosystem of development companies that are growing to assist any large scale efforts in Second Life.

One might want to add that in the case of SL even other companies and corporations are becoming part of the crowd. Of course in that case they expect to generate profit or publicity. This is not the case for many of the volunteers who spend hours engaging in activities that nobody could have considered hobbies or fun things to do a while ago. It reminds of Tom Sawyer charging his friends for letting them paint the fence for him.

I myself did an artistic work back in the 90s where I put up signs asking people to take photos and send them to me at a touristic place in Sweden. And my motivation was probably much the same as the one many companies have: A did not have anything meaningful to say. At least not about the castle where I was invited to participate in a sculpture exhibition. Now I can admit it.

Just a couple of days ago I also read an interview with Jaron Lanier who is highly critical about user generated content and the belief in the wisdom of the masses. He thinks that one of the central problem is that there is no model for directly making money with publishing content on the web. That is why it is expensive for companies to create content themselves and why it is cheap to hire the crowd.

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