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A Million Penguins - crowdsourcing down the Strand

Tue, 2007-02-20 22:58Steve Moore

We already have Matt the pioneer of  one audacious crowdsourcing project coming to Uploading.. and today the ever reliable curator of new crowdsourcing ideas Jeff Howe points to another similarly ambitious proposition brewing within one of our own most venerable brands. Yes Penguin have a wiki experiment  on the go

So is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise. We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour - the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months. 

worth keeping an eye on; even as a curiousity... 


Wed, 2007-02-21 09:32Roland Harwood
Roland Harwood's picture

Drawball

I have my doubts that a million penguins will be a great novel but it is certainly an interesting project. Who know's where it might lead. I stumbled across another interesting project called Drawball http://www.drawball.com/ for all those budding doodlers and artists out there.


Thu, 2007-02-22 08:11Mark McGuinness
Mark McGuinness's picture

The Dumbness of Crowds

I love collaboration but I'm not sure about a novel-by-consensus. Kathy Sierra wrote a great post called the Dumbness of Crowds - about the kind of projects that are best (and worst) suited to online collaboration.

For example:

'"Collective Intelligence" is about getting input and ideas from many different people and perspectives.

"Dumbness of Crowds" is blindly averaging the input of many different people, and expecting a breakthrough.
(It's not always the averaging that's the problem it's the blindly part)'

 

 

http://www.wishfulthinking.co.uk/blog