http://blog.crowdflower.com/2009/02/crowdsourcing-the-origin-of-the-word-crowdsourcing/ Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:42:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 http://blog.crowdflower.com/2009/02/crowdsourcing-the-origin-of-the-word-crowdsourcing/#comment-947 Jeff Howe Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:35:28 +0000 http://blog.doloreslabs.com/2009/02/crowdsourcing-the-origin-of-the-word-crowdsourcing/#comment-947 For the record, I coined the term, as Safire indicated in his column. I was the one who contacted Steve, because he used the term in a post that preceded the publication of my Wired article, The Rise of Crowdsourcing, but followed by a few months the point at which my editor and I coined the word and it began to come into use around the Wired offices. Steve is friends with Wired's editor, Chris Anderson, and I had speculated that he picked it up from Chris. That said, Steve couldn't remember talking to Chris in that period, and it's entirely possible that he simply came up with it on his own. I like to think that if Wired and I hadn't promulgated the word, someone else would have. The zeitgeist has a way of expressing itself. At any rate, all the other mentions you cite above would seem to be erroneous. We did our due diligence before publishing the article, and no one was using it at the time, which is what made Steve's mention all the more unusual. (I don't think Cooltownstudios, for instance, even existed back then, though I could be wrong.) For the record, I coined the term, as Safire indicated in his column. I was the one who contacted Steve, because he used the term in a post that preceded the publication of my Wired article, The Rise of Crowdsourcing, but followed by a few months the point at which my editor and I coined the word and it began to come into use around the Wired offices. Steve is friends with Wired’s editor, Chris Anderson, and I had speculated that he picked it up from Chris. That said, Steve couldn’t remember talking to Chris in that period, and it’s entirely possible that he simply came up with it on his own. I like to think that if Wired and I hadn’t promulgated the word, someone else would have. The zeitgeist has a way of expressing itself. At any rate, all the other mentions you cite above would seem to be erroneous. We did our due diligence before publishing the article, and no one was using it at the time, which is what made Steve’s mention all the more unusual. (I don’t think Cooltownstudios, for instance, even existed back then, though I could be wrong.)

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