Every day hundreds of millions of people type their thoughts, needs, and desires into Google’s search box. Aggregate those and track them over time and you can begin to see patterns, in flu epidemics, the economy, products, candidates — just about anything really.
I am a reasonably intelligent person, so one day I was wondering how much I could make by signing up and working as a Turker on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
Chris Anderson (of the Long Tail) recently articulated an interesting metaphor regarding social media and driving a project/organization forward. In his post Open source is a company; social media is a country I would call particular attention to his take on successful open source projects:
Many people mistakenly think that open source projects are emergent, [...]
Some of you might wonder why anyone would participate in many of the activities discussed here or whether it is all sustainable given that they result in little to – more commonly – no money, should ponder what Clay Shirky has to say about what he calls Cognitive Surplus, a concept I just can’t get enough of.
Crowdsourcing or collaboratively creating content of any kind becomes dicey very quickly and the odds of creating something greater than the sum of its parts are low. In fact, creating by committee generally leads to utter crap. (When was the last time you read and enjoyed a story written line by line by contributors?) But with collaborative sites and, in my view, a talented orchestrator, it might be possible to create something of quality or, at least, facilitate an interesting experience, regardless of the end product.
Innocentive used for non-profit challenges: An interesting addendum to my previous post (Part 6 of The Series), about 20% of Innocentive’s portfolio of projects are aimed towards solving non-profit challenges. Further, they recognize the possibility of pairing this crowd-problem solving with crowdfunding: someone decides to champion a particular problem and, using the Innocentive platform, [...]
Some tasks cannot be accomplished by automated, centralized means but can be broken up into smaller, manageable chunks that anyone can do. Shockingly, the internet comes in handy for these types of projects. Tasks that would be simple for a human (identifying an object or poorly scanned word in an image) can be [...]
My former employer Forrester and my former co-worker Chris Townsend recently wrote a report called “Tapping The Wisdom of Experts“. This is an extension or subset of the concept of Innovation Networks which Navi Radjou has been writing about for years at Forrester and can be seen as a subset, as well, of crowdsourcing.
