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Crowdsourcing: A Definition

  • I like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:

    The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

    The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

Crowdsourcing in the News

  • March 25, 2007: New York Times and NPR's On the Media
    Another twofer: First, in yesterday's Times Jason Pontin takes a first-hand look at Mechanical Turk, ChaCha.com and Jeff Bezos' notion of "artificial artifical intelligence." His experience is less than satisfactory, and a reminder that not everything should be crowdsourced.

    My favorite NPR show, On the Media, interviews TPM Muckraker's Paul Kiel about the site's recent experiment in crowdsourcing. Muckraker asked its readers to parse the 3,000 emails pertaining to the firing of federal prosecutors that Dept. of Justice released last week. Within hours Muckraker readers were ferreting out compromising passages, some of which led to news leads for MSM pubs, further evidence that the crowd has a promising future in performing investigative functions. Shady politicians (is that phrase redundant?) beware.
  • March 19, 2007: New York Times and Detroit Free Press
    Today's a twofer: The New York Times' David Carr writes about Assignment Zero in his column, "The Media Equation." I edited David a few times at the now defunct Inside.com (It shined brightly but briefly). If memory serves, he could recall obscure circulation figures on certain newspapers and magazines from memory. No mean media critic, in other words. So I was elated to see him give Assignment Zero a cautiously optimistic treatment.

    Crowdsourcing also made the Detroit Free Press today, where religion writer David Crumm writes about how theologians and pastors are using the model to let their congregations "shape a church's worship and programs." I haven't followed the crowdsourcing in religion angle as much as I'd like, and this is a great introduction to the subject.
  • March 16, 2007: Radio: WNYC - Crowdsourcing and Music
    Does user-generated content threaten the recording industry? That presumes there's still a recording industry to speak of. I'm kidding—kinda. But CD sales get more and more anemic and companies building businesses out of unknown bands—call it music by the crowd—look more and more interesting (and viable) all the time. Yesterday I was on one of my favorite WNYC shows, "Soundcheck" discussing all this and more. Stream or download the show here. You can listen to my segment alone (it runs about 20 minutes), but I recommend you listen to the opening segment on the bizarre-but-intriguing midomi.com. Midomi is a social networking site that allows you to search for music by singing a few bars into a microphone connected to your computer. Soundcheck brought in a trained opera singer to put Midomi's software to the test, with humorous results. American Idol-meets-Myspace-meets-iTunes-meets-voice-recognition-software. That's some mash-up. What will those Stanford smarties dream up next?
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October 15, 2006

Diversity of the Crowd: Part III

• Crowd, MD: I've been predicting the emergence of crowdsourcing in the professions – namely law and medicine – for months. Earlier this month a couple Boom 1.0 veterans from Promotions.com launched OrganizedWisdom.com, which aims to provide, in its own words, "a collaborative health information community, combining professional and user-generated health content with social networking technologies to help people make the most informed health decisions possible."  The site has been met with some healthy skepticism, but at least a few health care bloggers have adopted a wait-and-see attitude. CEO Unity Stoakes is quick to caution that it will take time to for OrganizedWisdom to generate enough user experiences to achieve its intended affect. He also points out, in an interesting interview with The Health Care IT Guy, that this form of community knowledge gathering is nothing new in the health care industry. All the more reason, by my lights, that we're sure to see more companies like OrganizedWisdom tapping the crowd for medical information in the future. What I want to know is who's working on a crowdsourcing app for legal advice.

Posted by JeffPHowe on October 15, 2006 at 08:57 PM in The Professions | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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The Rise of Crowdsourcing

  • Read the original article about crowdsourcing, published in the June, 2006 issue of Wired Magazine.

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