Crowdsourcing

There are terms in this world that I really am not fond of.  For example, "drilling down" is one of them.  It's not good enough that we're discovering the sources of something, heavens no.  We have to drill down instead.  Corporate-speak in all its myriad forms is annoying to me to be honest, but "drilling down" just happened to be on my mind just now.  "Downsizing" and its more offensive derivative "rightsizing" are horrid enough to make my skin crawl.

Another of these cutesy fauxspeak words that's slowly crawled into the modern lexicon is "crowdsourcing".  Take any problem and send it out to the invisible masses on the far side of their computer monitors.  These masses will come back with possible solutions, perhaps quite ingenious ones.  Katawa Shoujo could sorta be considered a crowdsourced project, in a way.  The Oxford English Dictionary was, from the very start, crowdsourced.  I really don't like the term, but there you are. 

I recently stumbled over a great example of crowdsourcing, one that just couldn't occur at any time before now.

In 2007, the techno group Daft Punk released a CD entitled Alive 2007.  Recorded during a concert at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy (aka "Bercy") in Paris on June 14th, 2007, it's one of the better live albums you'll ever hear.  If there ever was a concert that screamed for a DVD release, this would be it... but none was forthcoming. 

So someone decided to make one.  He put out a call to people who were at the concert to donate video footage they recorded with their ever-present cellphones, blackberries, digital cameras and handycams.

Every one of those lights in the audience is a potential video donor, another point-of-view in an arena that holds 18000.  Mix the video with music from the concert CD for sound quality, and the result is nothing short of phenomenal (note that the second video has some NSFW words):

While there are times where the guy edits like his hair is on fire (it's 160 beats per minute, not 160 video cuts per minute!), on the whole you get a good sense of what the concert must have been like to attend... particularly if you've got a good sound rig and a big monitor.

You don't have to like the music to understand just how cool a concept this is... and how nigh-on impossible it would have been to pull off as recently as ten or fifteen years ago.  I may not care for the word "crowdsourcing," but even I've gotta admit it's an appropriate term for this.  To date, they've gotten most of the CD completed so you can almost experience an entire Daft Punk concert without all the annoying ravers.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:00 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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