On the day that the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine was released, the publication’s technology director searched the web for the word crowdsourcing, the subject of an article by contributing writer Jeff Howe. He took a screenshot of what he found, a total of three brief mentions, and forwarded it to the author, advising that Howe save it as a “historical document.” Howe didn’t have to wait long to see history in action. Within nine days Google was returning 182,000 hits. Nor was it a fleeting fad. Three years later the number had multiplied to 1,620,000, with regular appearances in the mainstream media, from the Washington Post to Fox News, where crowdsourcing was averaging two hundred new mentions each month. There’s a simple explanation for the neologism’s success. Howe had detected a trend and given it a word. The backstory, which Howe posted on his personal blog, crowdsourcing.com, supports this notion: In January Wired asked me to give a sort of “reporter’s notebook” style presentation to some executives. I had recently been looking into common threads behind the ways advertising agencies, TV networks and newspapers were leveraging user-generated content, and picked that for my topic. Later that day I called my editor at Wired, Mark Robinson, and told him I thought there was a broader story that other journalists were missing, ie, that users weren’t just making dumbpet-trick movies, but were poised to contribute in significant and measurable ways in a disparate array of industries. In what Howe characterizes as “a fit of back-and-forth wordplay,” he and Robinson came up with a term that riffed off the title of a business book popular at the time, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, while also suggesting opensource software and corporate outsourcing. When “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” was finally published six months later, the last of these three roots was explicitly evoked in the teaser: “Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.”