Assignment Zero – Investigating Crowdsourcing

On: March 19, 2007
About Michael Stevenson
I am a lecturer and PhD candidate in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. I've been a contributor to Masters of Media since 2006, though I now only post occasionally. A short list of papers and projects can be found here

Website
http://www.whateverbutton.com/blog    

Assignment Zero is a collaboratively authored journalism project set up in association with Wired magazine.
In what may be the truest of Web fashions, the project will begin by examining itself – or actually, crowdsurfing crowdsourcing, the process it hopes to benefit from:

Welcome. We’re covering a story: How the Web makes it possible for the crowd to be the source of good ideas. But instead of one journalist reporting, we’ve created a site where many people can work on the story, with editors as guides.

Despite the buzzwords (pro-am journalism = professional-amateur journalism), I think this looks promising. I’d sooner contribute to this than to Wikipedia, just because it seems like more fun.

See also the Wired article about the project

Update 20/3 – thanks to the experts for pointing out my ‘crowdsurfing’ faux pas. Actually the history of the web is nicely summed up by the shift from surfing to sourcing, but whatever :)

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