Wired's 'People Power': Where are the 'crowds'?
Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief, Wired Magazine, and phenom author and speaker for his “long tail” buzzword/meme success, presents the July 2006 Wired piece “People Power” as follows:
we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production…The tools of production...are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale...companies have found ways to harness the wisdom of the crowd
Anderson talks of “amateurs, happy to work for free” and “engine for growth is the spare cycles” and "wisdom of the crowd," phraseology strikingly similar to phraseology used last month in Wired by Wired Contributing Editor Jeff Howe, in his piece, “Crowdsourcing.” Howe’s phraseology included: “a billion amateurs want your job” and “everyday people using their spare cycles.”
It is unusual that Anderson’s July piece addresses themes similar to those addressed in Howe’s June piece and employs phraseology similar to Howe’s phraseology. Anderson, however, does not reference Wired’s June “Crowdsourcing” piece and he does not reference Howe.
Last month, in my "Crowdsourcing: New buzzword?" I signaled the interest of following the development of Wired’s buzzworthy memes.