We pause our regularly scheduled programming for a brief digression into the neologism of “crowdsourcing”.
Back in January 2009, a Wired journalist Jeff Howe contacted me to ask how is that I used the word “crowdsourcing” on flickr in February 2006, four months before he wrote an article introducing the concept? I had no idea what he was talking about or why this was getting him so agitated. He said I must have heard about the story through some backchannel.
So this made me curious. Where did the word come from?
So, I crowdsourced a bit of research. Lukas, founder of Dolores Labs a crowdsourcing startup, asked his virtual army on Mechanical Turk if they could find something that pre-dates my Feb 2006 mention. They came up with a number of references afterward and a clearly backdated forgery. As far as they could tell, this was the first one.
To check again, I am re-posting the relevant section of the flickr discussion group to see if anyone knows of a prior mention.
For those logged in to flickr, you can see the original thread directly.
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