Crowdsourcing

Back from Vacation: Link Round Up

Excuse the long absence. I spent the month traveling for the book and a week in Paris with the fam. Some people can balance demanding jobs and still write daily updates. I'm both mystified and mildly jealous. At any rate, expect a return to regular updates. We'll start off with one of Alan's round-ups, with a few additions from me:

Assignment Zero's Sneak Preview (on Wired.com): We've had our ups and downs at Assignment Zero, but we decided to release one of our articles early, and I think it does our experiment credit. Super-contributor Mike Ho wrote a feature about Larry Sanger's Citizendium, a controlled, expert-filtered version of Wikipedia. Assignment Zero is wrapping up, and I'll be providing more updates on the project as we enter the final stretch.

Miranda July from the movie Me, You and Everyone We Know and Harrell Fletcher have created this site: Learning to love you more. Choose an assignment. Assignment 59. Interview someone who has experienced war or assignment 31. Spend time with a dying person. Hard to label this venture but an innovative attempt to redefine participation! (Note: We're also hoping to cover LTLYM on AssignmentZero, so if you're into July or her art crowdsourcing joint, sign up to do some reporting on it, or to interview Fletcher and July.

A security lawyer's detailed look at Cambrian House. He states "there may always be an imbalance between the benefit a company can get from the community and the equity value the company can give back to individuals within that community."  STARTUP TOOLBOX  predicts that crowdsourcing isn't ready for securities offerings.

Outsourcing crowdsourcing? O'REILY Digital Media looks at worldofdt.com a post-production work facility for photographers based in New Delhi, India. It might sound like a stretch but if you are at all serious about submitting photos to a micro-stock agency, it's worth the read.

This might be older news but certainly an indicator of how crowdsourcing is going to get the attention of the goliaths. Deep Jive Interests title says it all. Dells Crowdsourcing More Than Hype: Tells Microsoft to "Suck It."

Business Week's David Armano talks about evolving platforms and human behavior. He starts with "Once upon a time" and tells the story we are going to hear more often. "It's the Conversation Economy, Stupid" might not be the stuff of Brothers Grimm but I bet there's plenty folk sitting up at night trying to figure out the ending!

Dovetail Software Blogs looks at the same problem from the other side of the looking glass. This article warns "development must never lose sight of the users" and in so doing points to the truth, "Knowledge Management Is No Good Without the Knowledge." Its amazing what a few months will do for a buzz word like crowdsourcing.

Shelly D. Farnham makes a lot of sense as she considers social networking platforms. Scroll around Wagglelabs.com for lots of insight and pathable your way toward the soul partner you always wanted.

Daily (Okay, Weekly) Round Up: April 10, 2007

From Jeff: Sometime yesterday Alan's following post disappeared. Have we been hacked? I can't imagine little ole Crowdsourcing.com drawing such ire from the script kiddies. At any rate, we're reposting it today.

Guambat Stew provides some useful annotation on Marc Wilson's blogpost about online newspapers. "This is about saving Gannett's bacon." It might be called a freedom of speech issue, discrimination, hypocrisy, being picked on but ultimately it's all about the race to own the Internet and that translates into a rich stew of dollars and cents!

THEORY.ISTHEREASON makes the claim that Singapore will never develop "YouTubes" or "Skypes. His theory looks good but more insightful yet was this interesting comment, "My advice to the government is not to look to citizens to innovate, but to themselves in making a concerted effort understanding what social media (aka Web 2.0) is really about." This takes the issue to a place where it needs to go.

Well what's new? TestTUBE is new but it's old new. Techno//Marketer points out the irony.

If you just awoke from a coma, been stranded on a desert island, or just plain old out of it,  New Music Strategies has a great overview to get you up to speed.

I want to go back to Africa! Yes, it looks like the place to be in April. Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales and Creative Commons CEO, Larry Lessig will be in South Africa for a host of festivities to celebrate digital freedom in the country. Check out the program here .

Mark Glaser of MEDIASHIFT has a great article on The Working Journalist in the Age of the Internet. He even mentions Chris Allbritton of Back to Iraq in regard to the very early days of crowd-sponsored blogging.

Daily Round Up: March 29, 2007

Jay Rosen interviewed by Leonard Witt who teases with the tidbit, I've signed up with AZ and might be doing an assignment!

Bad news good news! On one hand, two million women have been treated for breast cancer in the US. No wonder the reaction to John and Elizabeth Edwards' decision to stay in the presidential race was so immediate. The NYT broke tradition to use "crowdsource" reporting from its own blog for the very first time. The numbers are amazing, the comments heartfelt! The Huffington Post covers the details.

Steve Poland (contributing writer to TechCrunch) has just launched a new site called Ringside Startup.  A web start-up crowdsourced, down for the count in my corner!

Andrew McAfee spars with Tom Davenport! "My optimism, and my interest in the component technologies of Enterprise 2.0, comes not (solely) from my inherent geekiness, but from the fact that these technologies really are something new under the sun .... They're not extensions or enhancements to previous generations of corporate tools for collaboration and knowledge management; instead, they're radical departures from them .... What they will do, I believe, is give managers who want more lateralism, egalitarianism, crowdsourcing, idea percolation, self-organization, collective intelligence, etc. a new and unprecedented opportunity to obtain them." Join the bout here!

Must Read: Bob Garfield's Chaos Scenario 2.0—The Post Advertising Age 

And read on some more! Oliver Reichenstein on 10 Newspaper Myths Deconstructed

Daily Round Up: March 20, 2007

from Alan and Jeff:

Watch this now:

Hillary 1984 may be the most effective and disturbing campaign ad since the George Bush the Elder showed Dukakis looking silly in a tank. The thing is, the Obama campaign insists it had nothing to do with it. (I'm assured by a trusted source that works closely with Obama that this is definitely, definitely true--Jeff) San Francisco Chronicle calls it "a watershed moment in 21st century media and political advertising." That ain't quite crowdsourcing, but it's a very short step away. The best political ad in years was user-generated (or so we believe as of now.) Look for pols to start crowdsourcing their campaign spots in the '08 election.

A little bit of fun I couldn't resist. Masters of Media appear to have gone West to surf rather than East to source, or is the joke on me?

Crowdsourcing for God—Congregations tap the power of their people here!

P2P Foundation looks at Xavier Comtesse's report, Direct Economy. It describes a consumer-know-how led economy. The first installment from an English summary and translation of the original French-language report.

Billions With Zero Knowledge didn't make any mistakes in interviewing Mr. Craig Silverman, who runs an interesting site called Regret the Error, which is sort of like outsourcing factchecking to the crowd.

Daily Round Up: March 18, 2007

I asked Alan to exclude Assignment Zero posts from his daily round up for the simple reason that right now commentary on AZ overshadows other topics concerning crowdsourcing. He courageously took on the task. Here's what he found:

This very interesting LA Times piece about Josh Marshall, who owns and runs TPM Media, Talking Points Memo blog, sister site TPM Muckraker and how they blew open the Bush administration's firing a group of U.S. attorneys. This is a wonderful background piece, especially juxtaposed against the past few days' activity at Assignment Zero.

The Economist's crowdsourcing experiment, Project Red Stripe has taken an interesting direction by front-paging ideas that "are not" being considered for development!

NowPublic catches a Flickr—Infocult broods.

Companies are increasingly monetizing all those bits of data we all generate merely by being digital citizens. Now a bunch of sites are questioning the ethics of such a practice. Are you in control of your attention data? Do you deserve a piece of the action? Will only people who have something valuable to say make the effort to send a message to you? Attention Trust, Agloco and Boxbe all put some terms to the debate.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch shares a good introduction to Wikiseek, a community-edited beta search engine.

Old But Not Outdated ...

What with SXSW and preparing for the Assignment Zero launch I didn't have a chance to post Alan's note-quite-daily links late last week, an oversight I regret. I don't want the following articles and posts to get lost in the flurry of commentary about the AZ project. Here's Alan:

"What is crowdsourcing?" asks Jennifer Alsever in this BNET article. (BNET published this over a month ago and I should have blogged it then--Jeff) It's worth the read. Michael Bowens P2P Foundation goes the next step here, and clearly articulates why crowdsourcing isn't peer production. (I don't completely agree with Michael here, but this remains required reading for anyone interested in these related phenomena. It's an astute and lucid explanation.--Jeff)

An excellent report by Dan Gillmor's Center for Citizen Media on recent moves by mainstream media companies to bring their readers into the publishing process process. Another must read—ride with them here, as they push open the gates! 

Cambrian House offers a video: Don Tapscot on Wikinomics with an overview of crowdsourcing.

Daily Round Up: March 7, 2007

From Jeff and Alan:

Write and submit your comments in the form of a letter to Blog to America. Readers from around the world create the content and it’s not always a love story! Foreign and American perspectives are given separate tabs although dialog is encouraged.

The intellectual property market is expected to generate $100 billion annually and LegalForce has come on-line with their beta marketplace.

Also catch this, Dan Farber interview with US Patent and Trademark Office Director Jon Judas. The USPTO recently announced a plan to deal with the deluge of patent applications by opening them up to crowd evaluations, a la Wikipedia. It is, if I understand correctly, the brainchild of New York Law School professor and open innovation guru Beth Simone Noveck. Go here to read the background paper that lays out the conceptual framework for the effort. Go here for well-thought out contrarian view from Deep Jive Interests. For the record: we're all for the USPTO opening up the over-burdened, outdated patent system, but agree with DeepJive that the USPTO will need significant monitoring to keep companies from gaming the process.

David Wilcox, Designing for Civil Society and Michelle Martin, The Bamboo Project, are launching a Wiki Carnival on Social Media! Shout-out for hands on editing, join the Carnival, anyone for virtual cotton candy?

Good old fashioned common sense or, Performing Seals and other such creative wonders of modern business at oink    moo    yup.

Links: 3/05/07

Hi Kids. I've been in bed nursing a nasty chest cold, but I'm back in fine fetter today, with splendiferous plans for the blog over the next few weeks. For the time being chomp on Alan Booker's (almost) daily digest:

New York Times article on social networking as enterprise app: “Social networks are sprouting on the Internet these days like wild mushrooms.” The fact that Cisco has now acquired Tribe.net as well as recently acquiring Fiveacross has startled some in the business. Cisco’s attempt to organize the underlying technology to create a tailored network might just work although insiders think it’s a stretch. Picking wild mushrooms has always been a risky business!

RegretTheError’s Craig Silverman has a book deal and would like to crowdsource for input! He wants to create a definitive collection of media mistakes, error prevention, correction and tracking strategies. “Why today's media climate makes it imperative that the press meet higher standards of accuracy,” sounds like a great idea in this digital age where going “hyperlocal” is an Editors nightmare!

In a blight of wiki this, that, and the other sites, Lostpedia is successful. Why? Because it’s specific content allows obsessive participation. Where there’s smoke there's fire, and when you are lost on an island that’s a lifesaver.

Social Media Takes Center Stage. There's been a lot of chatter about gaming Social Media sites like Digg. In PR 2.0 Silicon Valley Flack Brian Solis discusses how marketers should be engaging the new new media.

Daily Round Up — February 27, 2007

Adam Arvidsson on Ethics and the General Intellect
An interesting opportunity to read, discuss and add commentary to the draft of his new book. He states in the second chapter, ‘ethics’ is not simply a ‘philosophy of the good’, but a technology of management.” Here, one can examination social and ethical questions of web 2.0, crowdsourcing and other recent web initatives.

The New York Times on X Foundation: It's "something like American Idol for the technorati.”
They're asking venture capital firms to cough up some money to offer as incentives for entrepreneurs to create new technologies. Already, the foundation has awarded $10 million to designers of a private spacecraft. With Google and PayPal founders on the foundations board they must be ready for the ride!

From the ProductWiki Blog: Who contributes/Who leaches? Nay or Yay, do the Nay’s have it? ProductWiki delve into the mathematics of user-generated content and come to the conclusion, with some informative links, that in several instances it’s just a small number of users who are involved.