Traveling Layers-Deep into the Nature of Crowdsourcing and Blogging, Inception-Style
First, if you aren't familiar with the term "recursion" please allow me to allow you a moment to google it. Go ahead, and when Google asks you if you meant "recursion" and you click on that, you'll be in the right frame of mind for this post..........Ohhhhhhmmmmmmm.
Article Contributed by Scott Yates CEO of Blogmutt
The guy who came up with the movie Inception, Christopher Nolan, said that he started playing with the idea for that film when he was working on another film only slightly less complicated: Memento.
I saw Memento with a woman I had met recently, and she really liked it. One thing led to another, and now she's my wife, and my wife picked out the dog that we now own.
Why do I mention these facts, and how does it relate to crowdsourcing and blogging?
In the style of Inception, we'll have to go a few layers deeper to figure that out.
Let's begin...
The top layer is easy enough to understand, especially for readers of Daily Crowdsource.
The idea of a crowd of workers is now well established. We know that many people are simply better than one person for complicated tasks, or for tasks where a bunch of ideas can help improve all ideas and where work can be done in parallel to produce massive amounts of content.
I understood that well-enough when I started out to form a crowd-based blog-writing company. I'd seen how well the crowd worked in companies like Trada, 99designs, and GoSpotCheck. Lots of regular businesses understood that power, too, and were happy to switch away from the old "expert" model.
I'd started two companies before, and I knew I wanted to do something that used crowdsourcing for my third company; but I started off with some really bad ideas. I kept reading blogs and more blogs and more blogs trying to figure it out, and that's when I went into the next level of this dream-like crowdsourcing world.
In that level, with my partner Wade Green, we figured out that the one thing most businesses needed, but couldn't find, was all-original blog content. We decided we would unleash a crowd onto the problem, and created a structured community for bloggers and businesses.
That was an idea, a simple idea that was so powerful that we were able to go to the next level of the dream.
In that level, we had to come up with a name. We played around with every kind of name involving 'blog' we could think of. Until, one day, when I was talking about our naming challenge to my wife, and she come up with a name after looking at our lovable mutt (of unknown lineage).
Now we must ask...Would we have a name as good as "Blogmutt" if it hadn't been for Christopher Nolan's film Memento?
Going one-level deeper, we come to the notion of this very blog post. This is a blog post about crowdsourcing and blog-writing, and the post is written by a crowdourced blog writing service especially for a blog that's all about crowdsourcing. (Say that ten times fast...)
This is as deep as the levels go. This is the point where the top is spinning and we don't know if it's going to stop.
In other words, allow me to allow you a moment to go and google "recursion." I think if you do you'll be in the right frame of mind for this post.
Now it's time to get back to my own company blog where sometimes we blog about our bloggers who blog for other blogs, sometimes even about blogging.
Let me know if you've enjoyed this blogpost. Ohhhhhhmmmm......
In all seriousness also, let me know if you see any recursion in your own work.
Amazon uses microtasking to clean it's own data... Have we seen a crowdfunded crowdfunding platform yet? Daily Crowdsource crowdfunded it's own crowdfunding report, so why not. Meanwhile Stephen Shapiro will help you innovate innovation at Crowdopolis.
Why not you? What do you recursively do? Let us know in the comments.