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5.4: Crowdsourcing

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    As discussed in Chapter 3, the concept of Web 2.0 sees the Internet as allowing enthusiastic communities to come together and provide more value for a given Web site. Crowdsourcing focuses that community power on a specific project and demonstrates how a large group of committed individuals can outperform a small group of experienced (and paid) professionals. The online version of Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, cannot keep up with Wikipedia in terms of updating articles and information. And Microsoft, with all its resources, has struggled to keep pace with the development of the Firefox browser, a project powered by volunteers collaborating together under the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation.

    Crowdsourcing is a relatively new term, coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 article for Wired News.2 It is very similar to “distributed,” “collaborative” or “open-source” reporting and many people use the terms interchangeably. To distinguish between the concepts, think of crowdsourcing like outsourcing, the term from which it was born. The focus of crowdsourcing is usually ongoing production of information while distributed reporting relates more closely to a specific and fixed-time project, such as answering a specific question or reporting on a specific subject. Voting irregularities, then, would be a form of distributed reporting since the need would be reporting for a timely news story.

    But don’t get frustrated by the terminology. This is all very fluid and rapidly developing. It’s the concepts that are important.

    In the summer of 2006, The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., asked for readers to help in the investigation of ongoing concerns over rising utility bills. The audience responded in surprising numbers and supplied the reporting that became the story. The newspaper was caught off guard by the initial flood of calls and e-mails.

    “The story built itself,” News-Press editor Kate Marymont said. “The public shaped it and we had to get used to that. We had to learn that online development of a story and the development of a print story take different paths.”

    Crowdsourcing harnesses the power of community on a continuing basis to improve a service or information base. When we built an online map plotting all the places in our coverage area to go for free wireless Internet access, The News Tribune then asked the public to submit locations that we missed or that have since opened. We also invited them to comment on the locations and add photos, enhancing the original service. In the first six months, dozens of readers have contributed.

    The concept of crowdsourcing might seem to lend itself especially well to grassroots organizations and projects. But some of the most notable examples of crowdsourcing have come from some very big companies, including Procter & Gamble, Amazon and Google. Following are some examples:

    • Procter & Gamble launched a Web site called InnoCentive offering serious cash rewards to more than 90,000 freelance scientists who could solve problems that the company’s 9,000 scientists couldn’t. It now works with other companies as a sort of crowdsourcing broker, allowing them to use the site to solve problems of their own. www.innocentive.com
    • Amazon.com describes its Mechanical Turk project as “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.” It pays people to complete tasks that people do better than computers, such as identifying subjects in photographs and translating text. This is the opposite of the InnoCentive project. The pay is low and the tasks can be done by anyone. People need to perform a high volume of tasks to make any real money, but the tasks are so simple that some 10,000 people have registered to “turk.” www.mturk.com
    • Google doesn’t pay people to participate in its Image Labeler program, but it made the exercise so fun that it can be addicting. The goal is to improve the quality of Google’s Image search. Over a 90-second period, you are shown random images and asked to provide as many labels as possible. You “play” with another random user and when the two of you agree on a label, the software gets smarter. http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

    References

    1. Jeff Howe, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," Wired Magazine, June 2006. Jeff Howe covers the entertainment industry as a contributing editor for Wired Magazine.

    This page titled 5.4: Crowdsourcing is shared under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Mark Briggs via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.