I Called, You Answered

A little over a month ago I asked if everyone studying some aspect of crowdsourcing would speak up and make themselves known on this blog. What a response! For months I've been telling amazed relatives that a handful of people are actually out there researching this thing, calling it crowdsourcing, and receiving institutional support to do so. (If any of you had ever seen what a goofball I was in my youth, you'd understand why this fact surprises and shocks my family.)  Now I can tell them that close to 40 people are studying crowdsourcing, customer innovation, social filters, et. al.

Now what to do with all this group intelligence? My original suggestion was that I would finally turn Crowdsourcing.com into what I always intended it to be, a venue for pre-peer-review publication of all manner of scholarship that fell under the crowdsourcing umbrella. But earlier today Alan Booker, one of Crowdsourcing.com's most persevering and erudite contributors, suggested putting it on Twine instead. If you believe the hype (and I've no reason not to), Twine is the first consumer application to employ the semantic Web, or what's being called Web 3.0. It's a social networking/group working application that automatically creates its own links, tags and other forms of meta-data. I've probably mussed up the explanation, but Tim O'Reilly does a more than passable job of explaining how Twine works. It's the brainchild of Nova Spivak, who launched Twine earlier today at Web 2.0.

I think this might be a fine idea, though I have my reservations. I'm inclined to wonder if we shouldn't let the early adopters work out the inevitable bugs in what is, after all, a fairly ambitious and relatively untested application. However, I'm just one voice of many here. So I put the question to my fellow researchers and students: We all want to connect and explore and critique each other's ideas. Do we take the established tact of gathering around a blog, or explore the (somewhat scary) new world of the semantic Web? Start your voting ...

Comments

[Matthew A. Gilbert]

Considering we are already on the bleeding edge, why not push the envelope a bit more? From what I can gather it sounds like Twine would offer a brilliant framework in which we could fully explore the applications of crowdsourcing. I would also suggest that we could also leverage this blog for some related activities, maybe those of a more administrative nature?

What intrigues me about integrating our academic efforts with a functional technological tool is that, in my opinion, it hints a bit at a new model of artificial intelligence. Not necessarily in the Philip K. Dick android way, but one that blends artifical and human intelligence into a shared consciousness/intelligence. Conceptually it reminds me a bit if Jung's idea of the "collective unconscious."

As I have refined my research interests over the past few weeks I find myself drawn to the study of technology that empowers crowdsourcing -- initially I was thinking of LinkedIn's "Answers" feature, but Twine sounds like an equally if not more compelling system to study. Please let me know how I can help facilitate this effort!

[Alan]

Here is an interesting look at “Captchas for Social Good.” “The Soylent Grid has a better chance of succeeding because its strategy of distributing the work via third-party sites creates an “ecosystem.”
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3706396

And this, CS “thinking outside the box: http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2007/10/22/katine-guardian-does-something-very-special-indeed-with-crowdsourcing/

And this, Crowdsourcing, wikis, blogging, communities are the reality of today: http://globalwatchtower.com/2007/10/19/loc-world-seattle-2007/

[Val]

I discovered Twine some weeks ago and I immediately thought it was a revolutionary thing. We are already the pioneers of crowdsourcing, by choosing Twine we should be the pioneers of web 3.0 too. It is a great opportunity to evolve, so count me in.
Valeria

[Jeff Howe]

Thanks guys ... I'm scheduled to have a talk with Nova Spivak in early November, so I'll let you all know how it goes. I won't have time to really start a project of this significance until early January, but that timing could be just about right.

[Alan]

This piece “Congressman to Comcast: Stop interfering with BitTorrent” is a worthy read!

Cheers, Alan

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9804158-7.html

[Jacques_blanc]

just come up on this blog to join the crowdsourcing group and I support the idea of using Twine. What a good move!

Jacques

[Alan]

Cythia Ware writes these headers with lots in-between on NextReformation.
Context is more important than content
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts
Surf on the wisdom of the collective
Related: build on the potential of reverse mentoring
Become adept at cross-contextualization
Practice digital interaction and learning:
Link:

http://nextreformation.com/?p=1851

Alan

[Tabish Bhimani]

Hey Jeff,

I was very fascinated with the crowdsourcing article you wrote. I'm currently doing a presentation on your article for one of my classes. Your work is being studied, buddy! I'd like to let you know, and you may already know this, but there's crowdsourcing done for more than just Chemical and engineering, videos and the like. A website known as RentACoder fully follows this model. Very interesting stuff. Do you think that you've restricted your opinion on crowdsourcing to only its benefits?

Thank you.

[Daren C. Brabham]

@Tabish: Plenty of criticisms out there on crowdsourcing, particularly in its potential to exploit creative labor for little reward. Also some criticism along digital divide lines, in that we can't assume the crowd has a diversity of opinions unless we've measured them and find the crowd is more diverse than internet access data indicate. Otherwise we have to change our theories. Shamless plug: I have an article coming out in the journal Convergence in February which addresses some of these potential criticisms. Email me for a pre-publication copy: daren.brabham utah.edu

@everyone: Another shameless plug--MIT media scholar Henry Jenkins mentioned crowdsourcing in his recent keynote lecture here at the University of Utah on participatory culture. Crowdsourcing mention is at 36:50 in this podcast: http://www2.utah.edu/podcast/category.php?id=6 Jenkins also did an encore of this lecture a few weeks later at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Vancouver, with the same mention of crowdsourcing.

db

[R.Ipoff]

I came to Mechanical Turk (MT) during the "Search for Steve Fossett" lately. When the search ended, I started looking what MT is all about and made some "HITs" for Amazon's own "Askville" social networking site. MT workers are doing hours of research for Askville for a reward of 2 cents. They are lurked into a competition by a "$1675 weekly reward", of which you can get a share of "$19 by only 2 answers voted Great Answer" but Askville.com reliably keeps you getting enough "Great" votes by a extremely faulty voting system and even more if you can't log in to Askville.com because you're a non-US-resident. (You learn all that after you did the work...)

So if you worked a month for 20 bucks, this money is partially going back to Amazon itself because all you can do with that money is ordering stuff at Amazon.com. But since you can't transfer your balance to a bank account or at least to one of the other Amazon.com affiliates like Amazon.uk or Amazon.de (even though an Amazon account is always international and all the stuff is on the same servers), you probably can't get this money at all. Shipping to Europe costs more than 20 bucks. Non-US residents are confronted with even more severe disadvantages, but Amazon/MT avoids warning international workers about that of course.

So MT is not only the most evil spawn of capitalism, it even falls back on highly dubious "fine print" tactics to avoid paying the workers their hard earned few cents.

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