In a special project tailor-made for the Web, Google teamed with the band Arcade Fire and writer and director Chris Milk on “The Wilderness Downtown,” an interactive music video set to the song “We Used to Wait” (The Suburbs, August 2010) in which viewers use mapping technology to contribute aerial and street-level views of the homes they grew up in. Fans were also invited to write letters to themselves as children, some of which would be used in a montage onstage during concerts. It was a great idea, but somebody had to read all those letters, and it wasn’t the band. For that, the team called on Crowdflower, a crowdsourcing company based San Francisco, CA that has over 500,000 workers in more than 70 countries.
