Probably © Warner Bros.In a vivid example of the kind of exploitative crowdsourcing I was talking about, Cisco is apparently building a network of humans that live to consume its products. Ironically, using words like "empower" and "connect", they cite Digg Labs as an example of their "network monitoring program" and use specimens' camera phones to monitor the their behavior while mining a "billion people's" web surfing habits to find out what is of interest to them (whoa, it's like a total rip of Original Signal!). This may just be the best example of a corporate "crowdsource" shop underway. What with government sanctioned torture on the books, it's only a matter of time before, indeed, they start sticking those metal prod things into our heads.

💬 Comments from the original post

Steve Mallett · 2006-10-18 08:53:34

This exploitive crowdsharing meme is the pits. I've come up with what I hope is the antithesis of it. 'customers' helping 'customers' at http://su.pport.us The idea is that since customer service is such an oxymoron, and most tech support is handled by people who -do not- know what they're doing that this actually a good spot for crowdsourcing, but for each other. Hope someone likes the idea and help me by pitching in what they know. Steve

Ted Rheingold · 2006-10-18 09:54:18

Chris, I'm really glad you are banging the drum on this one. If you expect to have a coumminity service you will need to build tools that your community wants to leverage, not make tools that can leverage your users. This crowdsourcing hype is just the incidious sort of MBA-fantasy that will drive board rooms to sink millions in something that's hardly been achieved at all, nonetheless within the confines of a pure business play.

Ciscoanywhere · 2006-10-31 02:43:38

Ok, I take your point.

Cisco is creating the Matrix