Babara Kiviat, a blogger for Time Mag’s The Curious Capitalist blog, has discovered two new things - Threadless and crowdsourcing. In a post yesterday entitled crowdsourcing worked on me she marveled at how Threadless works - it’s a user-driven business and its products are voted upon and ranked by its customers and/or site visitors. It is a highly successful and profitable business. Good job digging this up Barbara, Threadless has only been around since 2000. More details can be found at Skinny Corp the company that owns Threadless.

Meanwhile crowdsourcing is a term that was first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article and has been open to debate ever since. It’s worth reading the Wikipedia page about crowdsourcing where you will discover that Douglas Rushkoff and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales both have serious doubts about the term and its implications.

Nice to see Time keeping its finger on the popular culture pulse though.

AdWeek reports that “Federated Media Publishing, the blog-centric ad network helmed by Industry Standard founder John Battelle, has partnered with Microsoft to launch CrowdFire, a music-themed social media platform where fans can share and consume videos, photos and personal accounts from live concerts.”

Reading the story and then digging through the CrowdFire site I can’t help but feel that this is just yet-another-social-network. The site is clean enough and easy to navigate but seems a bit jargon-heavy as in the use of the word crowdsource. And Battelle comes over as oddly quaint when he says that the idea for CrowdFire was sparked when he attended several recent music festivals, and saw how prominent cell phone cameras and other portable video recording devices have become. That sounds so 2000 to me….