LINK[blockquote]"Crowdsourcing" powers sites like The Huffington Post and Wikipedia. But not for much longer.
Readers are becoming skeptical, web searches are starting to block them, and now the mob of unpaid folks responsible for much of the work is turning on the hand that fails to feed it, demanding -- shock, horror! -- to be paid.
Imagine that.
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Readers increasingly regard such sites as notoriously inaccurate, irrelevant and generally suspect. Restaurant reviews in Yelp may be posted by relatives of restaurateurs -- or competitors. Company profiles in Wikipedia may be written by the business' own PR department. And so-called citizen journalists at The Huffington Post may be publishing material that's actually written by marketing pros spinning "news" stories.
Indeed, HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington recently admitted as much, saying that her contributing authors are like those who appear on talk shows simply to promote their own books and movies.
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An even more threatening groundswell may be underway. Some of the unpaid, unappreciated volunteers supplying all this free content are going on strike. Many have become disillusioned with others taking credit for their work. Some have simply become bored (witness the decline in the number of volunteer editors working on Wikipedia). Still others have begun to resent the fact that their gratis work is lining the pockets of the owners of sites like The Huffington Post.
Visual Art Source, which had been supplying reprints of some solid art reviews to The Huffington Post, was the first to announce a "strike." It’s a small step, to be sure, but it raises the question, if others withdraw material from the site what did AOL actually pay for?
I don't expect that a great torrent of contributors will immediately abandon the HuffPo, but the trend is ineluctable. No one can sustain a work-for-free lifestyle. As the economy improves and people go back to work, crowdsourced sites will find themselves, well, without crowds of contributors.
Unfortunately, tech folks can't resist applying the same bad idea to every conceivable area of endeavor until it is thoroughly discredited. At the recent TED conference in Long Beach, CA -- the happening de jour for chic techies -- some panelists suggested that teachers (those outmoded educational tools) should turn classes over to crowdsourced videos and online information. [/blockquote]
So, wait a minute. I was under the distinct impression that lefties found capitalism and profit to be somewhat beneath them...that doing work for "the cause" was all that mattered.
Thanks for the laughs, lefties.