I believe that crowd sourcing and collaboration have both good and bad sides. In the case of open source projects I believe that it is a great thing. Though it may be thought that these projects are just one individual doing a majority of the work, I think that it comes down to a team that works together. While one person may have the initial idea and put in a lot of the work at first, afterwards others come along and help to finish the projects and make them what everyone sees in the end. A great example of this is the Android phone operating system. Although it is a Google project, their is a huge team of developers that work to create the system and then even more from all the different phone companies that make their changes to work with their devices. This goes along with Wikipedia too. One person may take the bulk of the information and put it together and make the original post but then others come along and edit and add to what is already there.

The downside of collaboration is things along the lines of iStockPhoto. The website takes away the income and jobs of many professionals. I feel that it is a great site for small businesses that don't have a huge budget but for larger businesses that have the budget to spend, they should hire a professorial to get exactly what they are looking for.

Crowd sourcing can be a great thing and the internet has become a great place for people to come together and share their knowledge of different topics to work together and create a awesome resource for everyone to use.