Crowdsourcing And the Wisdom of Bloggers

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by: Karl Long

If you haven’t heard about it yet a company just launched called Cambrian House that has built an incredibly interesting system to open source business ideas.

The idea is, you register on the site and submit ideas, those ideas are voted on, and the top ideas actually get created and launched, and you get a cut of the profits based on the number of “royalty points” you have. Now submitting ideas is just one of the ways you can earn “royalty points”, you can also contribute by submitting code or “creative” to projects for which you will also earn points. It looks like you get between 5% to 10% of the gross profits for as long as it generates revenue from just submitting an idea, not bad really.

I think they have done a brilliant job executing this concept, so does Peter Cashmore over at mashable, and his commenters are certainly having a healthy debate.

I think they have made a great start and would like to see them open up contributions to include marketing ideas as well. IMHO the code and creative might create the product, but unique and innovative marketing ideas are very valuable as well.

I have actually submitted my first idea, and it’s a combination of product, marketing and a little social media engineering. I’m calling it the “idea widget for bloggers”:

An idea widget is a bit of embedable code (think youtube embed this video) that bloggers can put on their side bar or in a post that points to ideas that they like. The blogger should be compensated with some royalty points for that idea for linking to it, as it is kind of like a vote.
Apart from generating mondo backlinks and loads of traffic there are a couple of revenue opportunities:
A. The use of the Idea Widget should get the owners of the idea widget some number of royalty points any time it is used
B. The Idea Widget contains a link to the idea and a small text based advertisement for a relevant company

Click on this image if you like the idea, and maybe us bloggers will have a way to earn royalty points by pointing at good ideas:

Original Post: http://blog.experiencecurve.com/archives/crowdsourcing-and-the-wisdom-of-bloggers