Crowdsourcing

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.

Introducing: Writer's Notebook

I think it's safe to say that journalism is changing faster than all but a few of us envisioned. The exhilarating (and terrifying) aspect to this is that everything—what we cover, how we cover it, how we distribute the coverage—is up for grabs. We must find what fails now so we can succeed later.

Well, so be it: I hereby anoint the Writer's Notebook, in which you the reader get to witness me blundering, flailing process that leads, when the stars align, to good journalism. Here's the thing: I really do believe the creed I preach. I think the crowd possesses immeasurable knowledge, creativity and experience, that it is, in short, smarter than I am. And I hope to profit by that fact.

Let's get down to it. As some of you know, I'm currently working on a book about crowdsourcing. I began in earnest a few weeks ago, and tonight I'm sitting down to begin writing. I'm starting with chapter provisionally titled "The Over-Education of the Middle Class." The basic argument is that the dramatic rise in the number of college educated Americans after World War II led to a labor force qualified to perform more varied (and meaningful) tasks than those at which they were employed.  This led to a rise in amateurism, which then fueled the growth of crowdsourcing when it emerged a few years ago.I've revised this thesis somewhat in the last two weeks, but I'll get to that later. After the jump I've pasted in a relevant passage from my book proposal to provide a departure point.

Digg This! Crowdsourcing in Real Time

From Alan Booker:

Ok, so this crowdsourcing thing is great. But, I don't want to spend my spare time beavering away at mind-numbing tasks for 10 cents-per-hour just to prove that humans are smarter than computers.

We already know AI software, or even the Semantic Web, still aren't at the stage to discriminate between finely tuned GO or NO-GO filters that require tight judgments based on a range of subtle multi-tiered contexts or human inferences.  That's why we humans still have form and function in this increasingly automated "computer profile says NO" society.

But what if I just want to sit back and let the crowd inform me about current hot stories out in the blogosphere, rather than keep logging onto Digg to catch the latest stories.

Well, now courtesy of those kind people at Digg Labs, I can get my own hot stories in real-time, just like those corporate types or City Traders with their Reuters News ticker-tapes scrolling across their screen.

Digg Labs can show you three pages of incoming stories - in real-time on your screen!!!

1.  Goto Digg "stack"  these have clickable links to incoming stories in real-time.
2.  Digg "swarm" this is a dynamic pictogram to show popularity of Digg stories.
3.  Digg "bigspy"  stacks incoming stories.

Granted, it only covers Digg based inputs for now.But it does demonstrate both the power and benefit of crowdsourcing initiatives like this.  One thing's for sure. This software model will be copied by
others and can only improve our real-time knowledge of what's hot on the internet.

Crowdsourcing: The Podcast

A few weeks back Alex Howard from the online reference site Whatis.com produced a podcast on the meaning, usage and various applications of crowdsourcing. Part of the interview took place while I was in final negotiations for my book deal, so if I sound oddly elated and excitable, that's why. Alex knew his stuff going into the interview and asked some provocative questions. The podcast can be downloaded here.

A Million Doubts ...

When Penguin Books, the venerable British publishing house, announced it would launch an experiment in wikifiction, I felt no need to document, or comment on, the fact. Frankly, I'm still skeptical that the same attribute that makes a million individuals working together so powerful (namely, our differences in experience, outlook, beliefs, etc.) would make projects of this kind a sort of exercise in tortured futility. A lot of labor and trial and error and—wikis being wikis—conflict for naught. But then I read this post by Jon Elek, one of the Penguin editors working on the, um, novel. He was winning, humble and—most of all—game. Just the prerequisites for any open source project manager. He admits his own considerable doubts, and then the reasons he cast them aside. Taking a page from him, I took my own stroll through the twisting, byzantine byways of the million-authored novel and found it, not only not torturous but even fun, in an odd, Postmodern way. Like John notes, I couldn't do it for much more than ten minutes, but that doesn't mean it's not great spectator sport. May the game go on ... at least until the vandals render the novel utterly unreadable.

Local Content Harvesting ...

A few weeks ago KFTY-TV, a Santa Rosa, California station owned by Clear Channel, laid off its 13-person news staff in order to cut costs. They have not shuttered the station, however, nor do they plan on ending their local news coverage, says Steve Spendlove, station GM. Instead, you guessed it, they'll be harvesting local content (all together now—"Eww.")

This is significant, readers, because up to now most outlets have claimed (many in good faith) that their citizen journalism efforts have been about establishing a more meaningful relationship with their audience and creating a better news product. Leave it to Clear Channel, the bete noire of all right-thinking Americans since they ruined terrestrial radio in the mid-90s, to turn it into a cost-saving measure.

Wish I had time to parse the various meanings of this move, but I've got a sick kid on my hands and lots of work for the book. And lots of smart people have already mulled this one over. Just want to make sure the crowdsourcing community is up on this ...

The original SF Chronicle Piece.
The always-savvy Matthew Ingram on crowdsourcing as cost-cutting.
Poynter's Peter Zollman piles on his indignation.

There are others, but an intrepid reader will pick up the conversation by following links in the above posts. Have to run ...

Spreken zie Deutsch

Hmm. Maybe there's something to this crowdsourcing thing. We received such a great response to the first solicitation a few nights ago that I thought I would try it again. This time I'm hoping to locate a German-speaking correspondent who will scan the blogosphere and file a report for those of us here at Crowdsourcing.com. Simply put, something's up in Germany. There have been numerous blog posts on the subject of crowdsourcing in the last several days, and I'm dying to know what they're about.

Some of you may be saying, "Hasn't Jeff tried this before?" Okay, that's true. In fact, I received a fair number of respondents to an earlier call for overseas assistance. My mistake was not adequately explaining what I expected from my foreign correspondents. This time I'm going to put the guidelines right in the post.

Step 1: Contact me at Jeffhowe@wiredmag.com and tell me you're able and willing.
Step 2: Go to this page on Technorati.com (a blog search engine). You should find 449 blog mentions of the term crowdsourcing. Don't let the number scare you away.
Step 3: Start reading. Invariably, many of these posts will be splogs or other forms of Internet flotsam. Unless there's substantive content keep moving.
Step 4: Try to ferret out discussion threads. Has a German crowdsourcing company recently launched? Is there an academic study on the subject that people are talking about? An incisive piece in Der Spiegel? Where else are the authors linking? Basically answer the question--what is everyone blogging about.
Step 5: Report back to me. Last month a reader living in Mexico contacted me asking if I wanted a report on crowdsourcing occurrences in the Spanish-speaking world. Two weeks later he filed his report: Nothing, really, was going on. Good enough. This is valuable information in itself, though I have a gut feeling this won't be the case with the German posts.
Step 6: I post your report on crowdsourcing.com.

And that's it. Crowdsourcing.com: We Walk the Talk.

Superbowl Wrap-Up Continued

You'd think I would have discovered this sooner: crowdsourcing content for crowdsourcing.com. Less than 12 hours after I asked my readers to dig up the vocational backgrounds of the four runners-up in the Doritos "Crash the Superbowl" contest, one reader Daren C. Brabham had completed the assignment (Full Disclosure: I was in email correspondence with him and suggested he give it a shot).

The point was to determine whether such ad creative crowdsourcing efforts were truly exhibiting the work of talented amateurs, or merely undiscovered professionals. Here's what Daren came up with, in a slightly edited form. He raises some excellent questions that I'm going to wrestle with tomorrow in a follow-up.

 

"Check Out Girl" by Kristin C. Dehnert — Dehnert appears to have had a considerable amount of experience in the film industry. She has blogged about her experience in the Doritos contest. The blog has more biographical information. She appears to have worked as a location manager on a number of productions, and a short film of hers won several awards at several smaller film fests. She doesn't appear to have done anything this "big" before her success with Doritos. I guess she is a good example of why if we're going to analyze the demographics and skill sets of the crowd, we'll need to explicate our categories a bit: What is an amateur, what is a professional, etc.? Is this category determined by how much formal training you have, how much tinkering and self-guided learning you do, how much success you've actually had in getting paid for those skills, or what?

"Duct Tape" by Joe Herbert — Joe Herbert, of the Herbert Brothers, is a Web designer, and his brother Dave runs a sports complex. I think Herbert could easily be called an amateur, but again I would urge clarification of the categories. Here is a biography on the Herbert Bros. and a bit of their reflection on the Doritos experience. 

"Chip Lover's Dream" by Jared Cicon - Cicon is a wedding photographer. Again, this calls for clarification between amateur and professional. If he is a photographer by trade, he has the skill set to know how to capture life through a lens. Yet, he's apparently not experienced with video, and he had never done anything like the Doritos gig before. So is he an amateur, a professional, or something in between? An article on Cicon.

"Mousetrap" by Billy Federighi - This one was my personal favorite of all the Doritos commercials, and doing some Web scouring to learn more about Federighi turned up something interesting: he's been in the crowd before. Apparently he has had previous success in responding to Converse's crowdsourcing venture, and now he has found success with Dorito's take on the model.

By all accounts, though, it might be easy to call this student filmmaker an amateur, but if he's had success with crowdsourced advertising before, does this make him a professional, or just a veteran amateur? What happens when people in the crowd begin to find repeat success with their ideas? When their ideas rise to the top on more than one occasion, will they receive offers to produce commercials for big companies in more of a mainstream way? Will they forever stay true to the crowdsourcing model and become elite faces in the crowd? We don't call even the best batters in the church softball league professionals, but we certainly can recognize their ability to consistently hit homeruns.

In other news, the college students who won the Chevy crowdsourced ad campaign appear to be amateurs in a pretty pure sense of the word, too. Perhaps we should start finding out how many of the crowdmembers who have their designs picked by Threadless are professional, highly trained graphic designers and how many are people who take their doodles and make them more polished. Can we get that information from Threadless, iStockphoto, and some of the other cases, Jeff?

Post Game Wrap-Up

Digital Video Recorders are a beautiful thing. You can watch the Superbowl and bypass all those boring commercials or, if you're like me, bypass all that boring football and skip straight to the commercials. This was, of course, the year crowdsourcing came to the Superbowl, with three ads created by users—two for Doritos and one for Chevrolet. In addition to showcasing user-created ads, the NFL asked viewers to help choose the game's MVP and the Grammy's asked viewers to decide which amateur chanteuse should perform a duet with Justin Timberlake next Sunday.

I personally loved the winning Doritos ad, a spot called "Live the Flavor" created by North Carolina video producer Dale Backus. It was clever and winsome and—unlike the trend in user-generated ads—pretty damn slick. But who cares about my opinion when we have, for once, reliable metrics!?! USA Today, Youtube and TiVo all ranked the Sunday night's most popular ads. "Live the Flavor" took top honors at Youtube, placed fourth in USA Today's Rankings and took the fifth spot on TiVo. Not bad, considering that Anheuser-Busch spends enough on their Superbowl spots to fund a small war, and "Live the Flavor" was shot on a shoestring budget and filmed in a single take.
 

I'd like to say this proves that amateurs can make just as compelling creative as professionals, but alas, Dale Backus isn't an amateur. According to the trade site Digital Video Editing, Dale is a principal in the Cary, NC-based video production firm Five Point Productions. (The company has a blog about their Superbowl experience here.) This doesn't mean the big agencies should be any less scared. When a company whose accounts consist of local wedding chapels starts taking your Superbowl business, you know the rules of the game have changed. ("It's kind of scary that a consumer can come up with stuff that good," one ad exec told the Wall St. Journal. But this does raise real questions about the crowdsourcing model. Does it truly allow talented amateurs to rise to the level of professional, or just create a more perfect meritocracy between people already earning their living at their craft?

I don't have the answer to that question, but with your help we soon will. Doritos picked five runners-up, and in what amounts to a crowdsourcing.com experiment, I'm asking my readers to continue the investigation and determine the backgrounds of the other winners. Pro or Am? Results will be posted, complete with any analysis you might want to add.