Crowd in a Textbox

This is cool

It’s a plugin onto Mechanical Turk from MS word… which allows (for a small fee) you to get a whole load of people to help with grammar, style etc etc in word-processing.

No word on the speed of it – and I don’t use MS products anyway, so that’s me out of the loop… but still… excellent.

I must take a closer look at Mechanical Turk actually.

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On a tangentially related note, the attempt at crowd-sourcing story, “Purefold” has admitted failure… and is no more. I was contributing (kindof) for a while… the only reason I joined friendfeed in fact. So what went wrong?

I don’t think writing is that much of a collaborative process to be honest. I know they have teams writing comedies in the US… but… I’m guessing that these coalesce into a chemistry between a few key people… and it’s more like agile/dual programming than anything that resembles art-work by distributed committee.

I also got a bad taste from Purefold toadying attitude to “brands” who in my opinion are facile manipulative cunts who don’t deserve to live. I don’t like brands, and I don’t like any of the thinking that goes into them. They are the heart and soul of inauthenticity… so behind the Purefold thing, was this nagging sense that the real purpose of this was to make someone else money. Someone who I didn’t like.

So… it kindof turned into a brain-dump of interesting things that we’d found on the web… and that was as far as it got… but I think a lot of us already had outlets for that – this blog for example… and in the end I was using it to send people back here.

Dunno – I’m an introvert. I’m not a team-player, ESPECIALLY when it comes to creative stuff. Sure I’ve played in bands for… decades on and off, but a band is a fairly strange creature… populated by fairly strange creatures… who dress strangely, and have strange and chaotic lifestyles… but there’s this sensitivity that connects them. Bands are absolutely about listening to other people, at a very deep level. It don’t work otherwise.

In the end everything to do with information always comes back to memetics, just as everything in biology comes back to natural-selection. With Purefold, the memetic… payoff wasn’t dynamic enough. The fact that the first 4 letters of memetic are ME ME is a cute coincidence, worth dwelling on for like… a second or something.