Minds for Sale

Hi all,

Yesterday my fantastic Executive MBA class and I were discussing crowdsourcing.  I had seen Paulo Goes earlier in the week talking about this phenomenon, i.e., collective 'intelligence' and super-cheap distributed work.

I have since discovered an entertaining, yet critical, talk that covers crowdsourcing, including optimistic and pessimistic or less optimistic scenarios about the buying and selling human work via ubiquitous computing networks.

"Minds for Sale" is well worth a look.  (Note, it runs over 50 minutes, so you might want to watch when you're at work, or supposed to be working.)  Jonathan Zittrain is from the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society and author of The Future of the Internet and How We Can Stop it (Yale University Press).

Zittrain describes Amazon's Mechanical Turks and other less famous crowdsourcing sites and experiments, including paid product and service reviews for hire. See my post on the cult of rating, ranking and reviewing.

Enjoy!