October 21, 2009 at 4:11PM
By Brian Clark Howard
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Tall, lanky and a bit geeky, it's hard to imagine Harvard Nieman Fellow Jeff Howe banging elbows with punks half his age in the moshpits of the Warped Tour. But that's exactly what the Wired journalist and author of the recent book Crowdsourcing did in 2005. He wanted to see what the kids are like these days.
Howe discovered a culture of "promiscuous creativity," according to his talk today at a Mediabistro conference on user-generated content. He said that young people are less apt to describe themselves by a narrow vocation (think "the" filmmaker, artist or teacher of past generations), and are more likely to be engaged in a fluid and ever-growing array of creative pursuits, from video making to designing websites, inking tattoos, blogging and much more. "Even those playing in front of 2,000 people don't think of themselves as musicians, they're 'playing music,'" said Howe.
Unlike his generation, Howe added, technology itself isn't interesting to most of these kids. "What they care about is what they can do with it," he said. Howe extends this to web 2.0. Don't think of your base as "users," or that they're "making content," he cautioned. "The cardinal rule of crowdsourcing is ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community."
Answering an audience question on how websites or other organizations can first start a functioning community, Howe said the secret is to offer them something they value, not to just assume that people will want to work for free. For example, he pointed to what he called "essentially a failure" in crowdsourced journalism, Assignment Zero, which he had worked on with Jay Rosen of NYU and my friend Dave Cohn, who also helped with research on Howe's book. "The mistake is asking people to write stories. No one wants to do that, that's like asking them to redo term papers," Howe told a small group of listeners. Instead, Howe's message is to keep it simple when you're asking for community involvement.
That's the same message Ben Huh, CEO of the insanely popular I Can Has Cheezburger?, gave the Mediabistro conference the day before. Huh describes himself as fundamentally lazy, and argues that most everyone else is too. Starting with the goal of "making people happy for five minutes a day," the network of 25 sites about goofy cat photos, weird accidents and Excel-style charts riffing on pop culture has built a business to the tune of 1 billion pageviews every four months, and 12 million monthly unique visitors. "Ask yourself what would I want to do if I came to your website for only 40 seconds, which is being generous," said Huh.
The secret of all those goofy LOL cats (see some green LOL cats I rounded up here) is that Huh and the original founders of the site (who sold it to him) have always kept the upload/creation process extremely simple, so anyone can do it.
To Huh, the goal of a business should be to "eliminate distractions and let the users dictate your goals. Think, 'If I could work for only four hours a week, what would I do?'" It's the same idea as Jeff Jarvis's rule of "do what you do best and link to the rest."
Howe coined the term crowdsourcing (he first thought it a "silly hipsterism," but it caught on after his Wired editors liked the word better than his story pitch), and he gave several examples of it at work, the first being major changes in the stock photo business. After a Canadian designer decided to upload his none-to-impressive photos to a new site he created, iStockphoto, and trade rights to them with other users for their images, something profound happened. A community developed, started talking to each other, and soon the founder had to charge a quarter for each image download to defray his considerable server expenses. Now iStockphoto is a profitable, and rapidly growing, arm of Getty Images, and the price of stock photos has plummeted from $300 an image to $1, while thousands of amateur and pro shutterbugs from around the world are constantly uploading fresh work. A few have even made serious money.
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