Crowdsourcing has occasionally been an alternative to doing things the old-fashioned way by, say, paying an expert. While many indirect effects of crowdsourcing exist, there has been little direct impact on employees within a given organization. When Wikipedia let many thousands of users create its content, no professional writers or editors were displaced. Encyclopedia publishers didn’t all fire their staffs and start wikis. Travel reviews written by users haven’t put the big travel guides out of business, nor have those firms decided to cut staff and let travelers do all the work. An interesting post by Tom Foremski at ZDNet describes one of the first examples I have seen of one company cutting paid staff to let users do the work for free:
Jul 272008
Jul 202008
It’s been a long while since I posted here, and I apologize to those readers who noticed. It’s been an interesting time in the last few months, including the sale of a major community website and taking on some new responsibilities in the post-sale environment. I have been keeping up my posting at Neuromarketing, and I hope a few of my readers here have followed some of the interesting developments in applying brain science to marketing.