Ragnar Danneskjold

Fifty Interviews Filed! More Coming All the Time!

It's true: We’ve got 50 interviews in so far.... And they just keep coming! I think at this point we can safely declare Interview Week a success.

The transcripts are all collected here. Some appear at that link in full, others you’ll see are abbreviated; just click on the headline to link to the topic page where the full transcript appears.

We can barely keep up with the pace at which the interview transcripts are coming in. Just when I think I’m almost up to speed reading them all, there are more. But we wanted to start highlighting some of the fascinating things our experts are saying about crowdsourcing.

Subvertandprofit.com “operates a black market for votes on social networking sites,” in the words of its 19-year-old founder, who goes by the pseudonym Ragnar Danneskjold. Ragnar told AZ contributor Derek Powazek that while some users of Digg.com “cling to democracy as the final ideal,” others “understand that their community is a wild anarchy...and I believe they like it that way.”


Exploring the Dark Side of Crowdsourcing with Ragnar Danneskjold of Subvert & Profit

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fraying

Can crowdsourcing be used to manipulate open networks?

Derek Powazek interviews Ragnar Danneskjold of Subvert & Profit

Ragnar Danneskjold does not exist. The name was dreamed up by Ayn Rand for a rebellious pirate in her seminal book, "Atlas Shrugged." In the book, he's part criminal, part intellectual - a man who does bad things for good reasons.

Now the name has been taken by a 19-year-old American. As the creator of Subvert and Profit, a site that makes a business out of gaming social media site Digg for paying advertisers, there are a lot of people who'd like to know his real name.

Like Rand's pirate, Danneskjold talks revolution, but is not afraid of getting his hands dirty. But is he really a Robin Hood for Web 2.0 or just a crowdhacking profiteer? Derek Powazek conducted this interview for AssignmentZero to find out.

UPDATE: After completing this interview, the Digg account I'd used to test Subvert & Profit was disabled by Digg. The arms race continues.

Derek Powazek: What's your elevator pitch for Subvert and Profit?

Ragnar Danneskjold: Subvert and Profit fills the niche market for 'darker' crowdsourced actions. Beginning by operating a black market for votes on social bookmarking services, S&P will bootstrap itself towards operating a full-fledged crowdsourcing marketplace for clandestine actions on the Internet. Striving to maintain our allure and underground appeal, we seek to represent the fundamentally subversive nature of the Internet.

5/21/07
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