via Evelyn at Crossroads Dispatches (who's consistently worth reading, btw), a fascinating post by Cory at boingboing:

Ultimately, the largest expense in an Internet marketplace where anything is available always anywhere is marketing: the more choice, the more expensive influencing choice becomes.

So a social SHREK@HOME could engage its audience not just for their cycles, but for their evangelism... The more engaged fans are with work, the purer the evangelism.

Cory's idea extends to participatory development: an "audience cut" of the movie, evolving (many-faceted) as it's rendered.

Of course the software industry has been trepidly running the usual, somewhat participatory, "beta" or "early adopter" programs and the like for a long time. Open-source development, in some contrast, succeeds best where the early adopters have the skill and patience to hack code, creating a collaborative development effort. Is there something in the middle which can harness the motivation of talented people without either treating them as "clients" nor demanding the sort of esoteric expertise which software developers guard so carefully? I'm sure there is.