A few weeks back a couple of guys from the office who thought they were kind of funny launched a new site called chTONGUEeek (i.e. Tongue in Cheek): Fair and balanced news, starting tomorrow. For a sample of some of the content you can find there (and follow via twitter or the Facebook Fan Page), you can check out some of our personal favorites such as local man accidentally purchases bank, War on Drugs accidentally claims life of big pharma executive, Paulson creates innovative new trickle up policy to save the economy, William Shatner’s New Show Debuts to “Unexpectedly Large” Audience of Five, and for Canadians in particular Penguins lead coalition attempting to declare themselves the 2008 Stanley Cup Champions. Did I mention you can follow it on twitter and Facebook?

The reason that I am writing about it here is blatant self-promotion two-fold – we are attempting to build chTONGUEeek by sticking to the principles of wikinomics, and do so at an absolute minimum of out-of-pocket expense. From what we’ve seen so far (with this project and the research), these two things often go hand in hand.

As of right now, the total expense incurred has been a little over $200, and outside of a few plans we have for rewarding contributors, we don’t expect this to go a penny higher for the foreseeable future. About 1/4 of this expense was unavoidable – domain name registration. The rest was for the logo design, and to get us off on the right wikinomics foot we decided to go with crowdSPRING for what eventually became this:

Regular readers may remember I wrote about my interview with the founders of crowdSPRING back in June. The idea behind the company is simple – anybody can post a description of creative project, the reward that they are offering, and the end date. Interested artists within the community then submit designs (the company guarantees a minimum of 25), and the buyer can continually provide feedback as they flow in to guide the community towards what they want, before finally selecting a winner. crowdSPRING takes care of the payments, legal issues, etc.

We decided to post our project for the minimum amount – $150 – with a one week time frame, providing a brief description and an absolutely terrible graphic representing what we were thinking. Over the course of the week we received a total of 69 submissions, with quality ranging from pretty bad to quite intriguing. In order to get the most out of the platform, we provided feedback (at minimum a rating) on every submission in timely fashion, and it was the work of Peg770 that was clearly rising to the top. We sent her a couple of personal message for some final tweaks, and in the end declared her the winner, receiving a portfolio of different logos she had created for us (you can see some of them in the box marked with the award tab). We thought it was a great experience, and absolutely brought home the power and value of crowdsourcing.

From there, we’ve built the initial site through Word Press (free), borrowed some hosting for the time being (free), and had the more skilled of us (not me) get the site designed and “live,” while we both focus on creating some hopefully entertaining content in our spare time (of which there is very little). Next steps include the launch of our initial store through CafePress (either free or $6 / month), figuring out our incentive plan for attracting a community of contributors (probably not free), and most importantly building our social media marketing strategy (free, but what will be the most time consuming). It is the latter I am most interested in, and will be reporting back time and again if something interesting comes up. In the meantime, seats are still available on Twitter and Facebook – but they are going fast .