Entering design contests as your permanent job?

I'd have to be honest, but I had never heard of "crowdsoursing" until I read the articles assigned by the professor. I thought it's a pretty cool idea that they came up with, but there's many people who are against the idea of crowdsoursing.

In Jeff Howe's article, he talked about how crowdsoursing is evil for artists. For what I understood, he thinks that companies take advantage of artists and designers because they can get their works done way cheaper by holding a "design contest" than asking the professional designers to do their work. The company name the winner and it receive the design in exchange with fairly small amount of prize money. Critiques argue that it's taking designer's job away, ruining the industry.

Although it makes sense in a way, I would have to counter-argue this thought. I think that critiques who make these argument don't realize that the people who apply to these "design contests" are not the professional artists, or yet to become professional artists. Those might be the people who wants to share their talent with others or companies that are willing to use their work. Those might be the people who have other jobs but does designing for fun, and looking for a chance to give it a try in those contests. Professional artist have works other than here, and I believe that people who enter those contests do it for leisure. Design contests where everywhere before the term "croudsoursing" appealed. It's the technology that boosted up the phenomenon.

+Photo Credit+
http://www.masternewmedia.org/online_marketing/user-generated-marketing/web20-user-generated-marketing-crowdsourcing-online-marketing-strategy-20070530.htm

Topic one: Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg said, "...Facebook has evolved to make sharing information more efficient and to give people more control" in his facebook blog. But my opinion on facebook is that it actually had an adverse effect when it comes to "giving people control" in sharing information.

No one can deny that facebook has way too much information going around. Mark argues that it made it easier for us to find information- but whether that information is important or usable is rather questionable. Maybe there is very important information on facebook... but how do we supposed to find them?
Are status updates like "this person is eating an apple pie" worth sharing with his 500+ facebook friends? Will those friends appreciate that information?

I think that people have more control over sharing information in "real-world" social networking. The time and source is limited in real-world social networking, so people tend to focus on sharing very important information.
But of course, we cannot live without online-social networking and the benefits that they bring to us.

I think the challenge for social networking sites today is to sort the information in the way that users receive right kind of information they are looking for more precisely. And users of those sites should also consider what kind of information they should be sending out to the world.

Hello :)

Hello-


My name is Mai, and I will be writing this blog for my itec class about social networking, social media and Web 2.0!


English isn't my first language and I'm not a good writer... but I will try my best! :D

On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own.