My newest column at Futurismic explores the power of crowds.  Before I started researching this, I knew about crowd-sourcing used to get people to a particular place to do something interesting like perform the Thriller dance in mass in public, or for demonstrations (Tahrir Square).  I knew about crowd-sourced translation projects.   I didn’t know that one particular business raised almost a million dollars that way, or that I’d come to the conclusion that crowd-sourcing has basically gone mainstream.