Crowdsourcing: Taking the World By Storm

Up until a week ago I had no idea what crowdsourcing was, I had never heard the term on a regular basis and had no idea what it meant. To my surprise, I am pretty alone in that category. Crowdsourcing is everywhere, you just have to know where to look.

Surfing on the internet I ran across a website with a list of the "10 Ways that Crowdsourcing is Taking Over the World." This article lists websites that use crowdsourcing in astonishing ways from playing a protein folding game on Fold.it that could potenially cure diseases to GalaxyZoo a website that works to identify new galaxies. There is no limit to what crowdsourcing can do in our modern world of technology.

There is a website completely devoted to compiling all of the new and exciting ways that crowdsourcing is being used. Whether it be to help design a building or spread love for Valentine's Day; crowdsourcing.org has it all! This website provides resources and criticisms for crowdsourcing ideas that will not work. Not only is crowdsourcing a way to spread ideas but it is also becoming a platform for sharing laborous tasks. Cloud Labor is the new way to split up tasks and get them done cheaply by many people rather than at a high price by one person. This virtual labor pool could be the new career for people to go into, espescially when many large companies are laying off workers in order to utilitze cloud labor.

Maybe we need to start thinking about the next generation of workers, and whether they will even need to leave the comfort of their home to go to work. Crowdsourcing may be a good or bad thing at the end of the day. Personally, I want to learn my trade and have a career rather than have a packet of work sent to me over email from a random company I don't know.

Crowdsourcing: Tool for public participation

One of the more difficult problems a public policy or urban planner encounters is public participation.  Planning when to schedule meeting so people can show up uncovers bias when certain demographic groups cannot attend leading to uneven participation in the decision making process.  Furthermore, sometimes policy makers must make decision for a group of people of which they know very little about.  For example, choosing where bicycle rental stations should be put may not be a subject that policy creators have a lot of knowledge about.  Therefore through the use of crowdsourcing peoples individual opinions can be submitted without a disorganized meeting with polarized individuals drowning out general public. 

Crowdsourcing is only the basic principle that makes the public participation part easier, there is so much versatility that it can be and is being applied to a variety of community issues.  For example, the application SeeClickFix allows for problems like potholes, downed road signs, or even bulky trash pickup to be reported online through a computer or smart phone device.  Many cities have programs like this some even their own smart phone application.  A more environmental turn on crowdsourcing is evident with websites like Urban Forest Map which documents where trees are and what species.  This helps provide individuals within the community with information on their own urban forest promoting awareness and if they decide to plant a tree the ability to register it for professionals to see. 

Collaborative planning can provide citizens the ability to right a vision for the future of their own communities.  This is generally a weighty process because of the ability to gather people’s preferences and ideas and then reach an understanding among the expert decision makers.  Using the internet to gather information from community members in a quick accurate lessens the load on local governments to collect data and allows them to focus on writing a policy that appeases the majority.  

Crowdfunding

I first came across Kickstarter late last year when my old neighbor, Igor, created a cash cow. The more I read, the more enchanted I become, as it appears to break away from the more draconian, Crowdsourcing. To make this seem more complicated than it should be, let us diverge:


Crowdsourcing puts the impetus on all of those people who are going to be competing as labor. The process allows for the division of labor in a non-traditional, but still legal-rational, framework. Management is retained, but labor becomes even less contractual than today's modern at will employment situation.


Imagine you own a business or are management of a business, but you don't enjoy the concept of employees. Crowdsourcing allows management to place traditional labor items they want completed into the public realm. Now here is the fun part! Instead of paying someone a standard salary, management can now allow the worker to compete against other workers directly. But wait there's more! The workers aren't competing for a guaranteed salary. Instead they are working for the hope of winning a contest. Basically, it reduces the labor into a complete Thunderdome-ish commission system. Thus I went Marxist, and  I wasn't the first!


Here is where sites such as Kickstarter come into play, with a term aptly called Crowdfunding. With this system, management is thrown out the window. Here the product of the labor is directly put to the test of the market (which in all honesty that is what the crowd is). Investors purchase pledges, anything akin to tchotchkes on the lower end of the spectrum, to more handsome products on the upper end, including basically whatever the producer wants to give. 


Instead of needling around trying to develop something with pre-determined scopes, in the hopes of winning a $20,000 contest, the worker can put their product directly out to bid. If the attempt is to make a more participatory styled workplace, Crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter appear to be the way to go. Everybody is in it to win it, and gets to share the spoils. Of course this assumes you actually can make something worth value in a material society..... Alright, no more time for Marx.


Note on Crowdsourcing links:
Read the Wired.com article for a more realistic account of Crowdsourcing. Read the Wikipedia article if you are lazy.


Sources in order of use:


http://www.kickstarter.com/
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zpmespresso/pid-controlled-espresso-machine
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/employment-at-will-definition-30022.html
http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/12/excerpts-from-communist-manifesto.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1838768,00.html
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/index.htm

Business of Social Networking

Social networking via the internet has exploded in popularity beginning around 2005.  There are various websites all competing to have the most users and innovate in the most appealing ways.  The top five are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and last but not least Badoo.  These companies begin with large capital investments from venture capitalists but that is not a steady flow of income.  It is up to the owners of the site to discern a way to monetize their website traffic.  This is done through various ways; some websites have user fees or advertisements.  Furthermore, the most effective is through the sale of the vast amounts of data about people’s preferences and interests.  When people interact whether it is liking something on Facebook or tweeting they are expressing what they are interested in and large companies spend immense quantities of money addressing ever year.  This raises questions of privacy and how we want our data to be used.

The different types of personal data can be broken down into six categories.  The first, service data which contains what you submit about yourself in order to start an account.  Disclosed and entrusted data is everything you post on your own page as well and what you entrust to others personal pages.  Fourth, incidental data encompasses things people create about you that you have no control over.  Furthermore, behavioral data includes your preferences for who and what you do when you interact on the network, which articles you read or other linked sites you visit.  Finally, derived data consists of assumptions made upon all the other types of data about you.  Websites generally only sell service data and behavioral data because they can be used for marketing. 

Links and website trends:

1.        Facebook

2.       Twitter

3.       LinkedIn

4.       Google Plus

5.       Badoo

http://www.schneier.com/essay-322.html

http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/29/how-social-networks-make-money-listen-up-facebook/

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/social-networking/information/how-social-networking-sites-make-money.htm

http://www.affilatenetworking.com/top-social-networking-sites/

Web 3.0 Simplified

I found this image floating around Facebook. I have no idea on who would be the copyright holder, so if there are any issues I'm claiming fair use. I just thought it put Web 3.0 Technology into a simple snarky perspective. - Jack

Twitter, the New Water-Cooler

There are so many resources out there for information to get on the Internet and the most recent are blogs and microblogging. Blogs like this one for instance can be found all over the web about anything from cooking to political debate.

Just this past Superbowl Sunday microblogging was a huge piece of the action. Twitter is namely the largest microblogging entity at the moment. During the final three minutes of the Superbowl there was an average of over 10,000 tweets per second. That is an enormous amount of information floating through the virtual universe. On CNN.com in an article about last nights game, they referred to Twitter as the new "virtual water-cooler."

With Twitter taking over the sports arena, it is also taking over the whole market in general! Next year it is predicted that 39% of advertisers will use Twitter for their ad-campaigns in 2012. That's an enormous amount, considering a few years ago Twitter didn't even exist.

Twitter has taken over, and this microblogging phenom can only go up from here!


Links in order of use:
http://www.webpronews.com/twitter-erupts-in-the-final-moments-of-the-super-bowl-2012-02

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/06/did-record-setting-super-bowl-live-up-to-the-hype/

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/39-of-marketers-will-use-twitter-for-their-campaigns-in-2012_b18336

Justin Hall

We should take a moment to reflect on the work of Justin Hall. Justin was a pioneer, a visionary, at one time probably extremely depressed, and also a blogger. Not just any blogger. Justin was one of the first bloggers ever. His site,  http://links.net, was launched in 1994 and was a precursor of the technology you are looking at right this second. Sure there were other websites at the time, but Justin's provided something truly unique. In a New York Times piece he sums his work up quite concisely ''When I first started doing it, they called it a personal home page; then they said I'm one of the first Web diarists, and now I'm one of the first Web bloggers." His site's progression has been one that could serve as a Cliff notes for the Internet, starting off drab, and continually rethinking itself all within one site (thank you archives!). 

While it started off as a College project it simply continued to grow. He was eventually giving speeches at think tanks and chilling out with hipsters at SXSW, Sundance, and  Lollapalooza. He tried to hang up the towel in 2005, over general feelings of depression (who hasn't been there online), but his work continues. Of note is the general lack of frequency he posts updates to this work in progress. While he was one of the firsts to use the Internet for self-exploitation, he wasn't the last, and found it rather hard to back away even when given the opportunity.

Sources in order of use:

http://links.net/

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/magazine/19PHENOM.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&position=

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/20/MNGBKBEJO01.DTL