[Here's the third and final response in this month's Lab Book Club. We're reading Crowdsourcing by Wired writer Jeff Howe; Chris Vognar from The Dallas Morning News responds below to chapters 8 through 11. See here for more about the Lab Book Club. —Ed.]

We’ve saved the devil’s advocate portion of our Crowdsourcing analysis for last (because, as W.E.B. Do Bois once said, the devil must take the hindmost). This isn’t to say I think crowdsourcing is a sham; on the contrary, for better and/or worse, the crowd is here to stay.

I’m just now sure how warmly or universally we should welcome that reality.

Jeff Howe’s conclusion reinforces my belief that crowdsourcing is more benign and useful for some tasks than others. For example, kudos to the anonymous basement dweller Minh Lee, who crafted the perfect game mod for Half-Life. Such activities seem perfectly suited for a basement. What better place to kill off extra-dimensional monsters and zombies?

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[We had two folks attending Boston University's one-day conference on non-fiction book publishing yesterday. Below, the morning session from Chris Vognar. —Ed.]

Official title of the morning session Wednesday: “The Writer’s View.” Unofficial title: “Newspapers are screwed.”

But hey at least there’s hope — at least if you’ve got your act, schedule, finances and connections together enough to get a successful book published. The conference, which featured writers in the morning and publishers in the afternoon, came complete with a cumbersome name: “The Nonfiction Book as the Last Best Home for Journalism.” But the panelists were among the best and the brightest in the game, so they came with some alternative titles. My personal favorite came courtesy of Charlie Savage: “The Last Man Standing for Serious Journalism as Our Industry Dies.”

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