“Crowdsourcing” is a huge buzzword in the Web 2.0 environment. It works on the assumption that the wisdom of many is greater than the wisdom of a few. Crowdsourcing has been applied a wide variety of businesses with varying success. T-shirts (Threadless), encyclopedias (Wikipedia), biomedical research and development (InnoCentive), nominal tasks (Amazon Mechanical Turk), etc, etc, etc. There is a new player to add to the list called Name This. Name This is crowdsourcing the name of your company/project/product. Here's how it works. Your company pays $99 and writes a brief summary about your business and any other relevant info about the name you are after. For 48 hours the community brainstorms, posts name ideas, and votes on their favorite name. Once the time is up a super secret algorithm determines which names had the most support and chooses the winners. The top 3 namers and their supporters get a pretty sizable chunk of the money and your company gets 3 market supported names along with about 200 other ideas.
The Name This model is not novel or original, but here is why it is interesting. The majority of crowdsourced services require participants to have some sort of skill or expertise. Name This requires none of this to participate. The ability to think creatively helps, but as you'll see if you go to the site there are a number of participants who have not yet developed that skill. The beauty of Name This is in the simplicity. Name This is the most “mom friendly” crowdsourcing site I have seen and the companies seeking names don't suffer because of it. Naming a company/project/product can be either the easiest or hardest thing in the world. Sometimes a name just comes to you and its an obvious fit. But sometimes its an arduous struggle. This struggle is greatly eased when a community of people put their heads together to create a great name.
There are some bugs with Name This (no editing/deleting of your own names, name proposal overload, mysterious algorithm), but there is a lot that can be learned from them. Keeping it simple, easily accessible, and valuable (to both namers and companies) goes a long way when creating a crowdsourced community or service.