The Wisdom of Crowds and T-Shirt Slogans

July 9th, 2007 by Rachel

I’ve been following Assignment Zero since theaz.jpg day I met the Righteous Lauren Sandler and we geeked out over democratization of media. Basically, Sandler and a slew of other editors oversaw a crowdsourced journalism project which covered the story of crowdsourcing. Meta, right? Or, you know, “an experiment in open-source, pro-am journalism.” Wired is publishing some of the stories, and all of them are linked if you scroll down that post.

As resident book nerd, I’d especially like to direct you to this piece on crowdsourced creative writing. Novelist is one of the most solitary professions I can think of (exceptions notwithstanding) so it’s interesting to see what large groups of strangers come up with. From fantasy (I think?) to romance, it seems like results have been mixed but encouraging. I’m definitely going to keep my eyes open for books with hundreds of contributors.

drama.jpgWhen I’m not writing about books, I’m covering the next most highbrow forum for literary self-expression, the T-shirt. The Smoking Gun is giving the geeks some tough competition from bon-mot-adorned convicts in a neat mug shot photo essay. Brushes with the law are admittedly hot this week, but stay tuned, because soon they may both be blown out of the water by the 100% cotton cleverness of the Feminerdies….

 
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