Crowdsourcing Is Dead

For a brief, shiny moment back around 2007, it seemed like crowdsourcing would really take of
f.  However, by now it’s become pretty obvious that we just saw an enormous influx of Can Do people as (pretty much) the entire Western world got reliable Interweb connections at all at once.

Then most of these people grew tired of updating and fixing stuff on corporate web sites, because, after all, where was the pay off?

And the trickle of new, helpful people isn’t sufficient to keep up with the attrition rate.

I’ve been relying on the concert listings on Underskog and last.fm for years, but they have been growing increasingly erratic.  After missing a few shows that I really wanted to see, I’ve now gone back to old-fashioned web scraping and aggregation.  The thing we imagined to be a thing of the past.

What’s next?  Newspapers paying journalists to maintain listings?

I’ve put the source code up on GitHub, but it’s just a trivial Emacs Lisp HTML parsing and extraction script which outputs the result to this web page.  I’ve just added the clubs I’m interested in, and I’m not going to extend the listing to anything beyond what it’s displaying at the present.

So: Welcome back to 1999.  The brave new world was kinda amusing while it lasted.