Crowdsourcing has been touted as a future business model for everything from design, to advertising, to reporting, to data analysis. But is it for real, or just trendy?

Jeff Howe, of Wired Magazine, put a stamp on the phenomenon with his 2006 book Crowdsourcing, and has been gathering evidence for its development as the future of a participatory economy. He sat down with David Weinberger to go into detail.