First use of the term "crowdsourcing"

The term "crowdsourcing" was coined by journalist Jeff Howe (USA) at the end of 2005 while pitching an idea for an article about the way in which the internet was being used to outsource work to the general public, or "crowd". The article was commissioned for and appeared in the June 2006 edition of Wired under the title "The Rise of Crowdsourcing". Howe was pitching the article to Mark Robinson, editor of Wired, and used the word "crowdsourcing" as a joke – he was mocking the tendency of Silicon Valley types to use portmanteau terms. But Robinson liked the word so much that it was worked into the title of the article. Howe used it again in the title of his 2008 book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business and by the end of January 2009 the word had passed the million-hit mark on Google.