Last night, I got an email from a friend asking me if I wanted to go to the Crystal Castles show tomorrow [Thursday] at Webster Hall. When an opportunity like this crops up, I usually perform a little bit of due diligence if I’m not directly familiar with the band. Usually, this involves a little research on MySpace and Hype Machine combined with what I think of the suggester’s musical taste.
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I skipped these steps last night, because another friend had mentioned that she was going to the same show. I figured, if two people I know and whose musical sensibilities I agree with both want to go, then it must be a good idea. The clincher was when I used Facebook to make sure that these two people aren’t friends with each other. A sample size of n=2 from independent sources? Sounds like a highly successful utilization of microscale crowdsourcing ["taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call"].
If the concept is good enough to sell T-shirts [threadless.com], label images [Google Image Labeler], promote important news [digg.com] and sell as a service [Amazon Mechanical Turk: "Artificial Artificial Intelligence"], then it is probably a good enough way to figure out what to do with my night.
I guess I’ll know soon if my faith is well-founded.
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