Crowdsourcing

The Limits of Crowdsourcing—Required Reading

There's been a lot of controversy bubbling up among the Digg faithful lately. This is hardly unprecedented, but because social news is such a widespread and significant use of crowdsourcing*, these donnybrooks are more important than immediately meets the eye.

This one got its start a few weeks ago when Digg started purging its ranks, banning some 80 Diggers, purportedly for using scripts that violated Digg's Terms of Service. As it happened, many of the exiled were top Diggers, which is to say, part of the one percent responsible for driving 32 percent of all Digg's pageviews. Banning them raises two troubling issues at once: How can Digg represent itself as a democracy if such a small cabal of users determine such a large share of Digg's content? And two, given that this is the case, is it wise for Digg to alienate the same people that are buttering its bread?

And that, as they say, is just the tip of the iceberg. As I pointed out in my book, Digg and other social news sites are easily gamed. In fact, there are companies out there whose sole purpose is to do just that. Suffice to say that part of the reason for this week's radio silence at Crowdsourcing.com is my own research into recent events at Digg. I can't think of any more salient issue facing crowdsourcing right now than whether the crowd can act as a reliable filter, and there's no better place to start, er, digging into that issue than with today's required reading, an examination of the state of democracy at Digg from Mashable.

The Pitfalls of Citizen Journalism

I've got my kids today (sitter's home sick), so I'll keep this one short and sweet: As many of you already know (certainly the readers of my book), I'm ambivalent about the usefulness of crowdsourcing in journalism. Today proved my ambivalence isn't misguided. This morning a citizen journalist with supposed inside information posted a story to CNN's iReport site claiming that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the hospital with chest pains. Apple stock, unsurprisingly, dive bombed as a result, its fall only arrested once Apple spokeswoman Katie Cotton came out disputing the claim. (The story has been removed. Here's CNN's statement). (Update: Now the SEC has announced it will investigate the posting.) CNN wanted to give its viewers a voice. Instead it provided stock manipulators with one. Nice.

I think the crowd make excellent sources and additional sets of eyes and ears, but I believe the future lies in carefully cultivated partnerships between professionals and their audiences. Examples: I'm a huge fan of Talking Points Memo and their TPMMuckraker project, am bullish on my colleague David Cohn's crowdfunded journalism site, Spot.Us. Both let professionals work the phones and write the copy, but encourage the crowd to do what it does best (unearthing data and marshalling support for underreported stories, respectively).

Okay, so I never make things short and sweet. But here's my point: I'm much less enthusiastic about straight-up, so-called "citizen journalism," in which readers are asked to perform the same duties as their professional counterparts, without any support or guidance from them. CNN's iReport is a case in point. CNN threw up a shingle on their Website, and asked its viewers to contribute their own reporting. This both diminishes the contributions of the amateurs by ghettoizing it onto the back of the bus (metaphorically speaking), and fails to hold it to the sort of standards that professionals must adhere to. Like, say, identifying yourself before posting a story that could cost shareholders millions of dollars. Anonymity has its place on the Web, and it might even have its place on news outlet comment boards (though that debate continues to rage). It does not have its place in journalism, per se.

iReport's tagline is "Unedited. Unfiltered. News." I think there are some internal conflicts in that claim. "Citizen journalism makes about as much sense as citizen dentistry," Leo Brody, the founder of NowPublic, told me when I was writing the book. And it looks like someone—or in this case, Apple's shareholders—nearly got an accidental root canal.

The Candidates on Technology: A Stark Choice

Take heed: The following has nothing to do with crowdsourcing, but I think you'll find it worth your while anyway. My Wired colleague, Nick Thompson, has written an essay for Washington Monthly about McCain's and Obama's respective track records on technology in general, and Internet access in particular. As usual, technology has been given short shrift in the current election cycle. (Though at least it's not a punchline, as it was in 2000.) This is understandable, what with the economic apocalypse looming and all, but a shame nonetheless. The next administration will wrestle with some of the most complex, urgent technological issues of our time, including net neutrality and the innovation lag in the United States.

So for a moment, forget the bailout, forget Palin and forget about Iraq. Most of you reading this care deeply about technology, the Internet and the future of innovation. As Thompson points out in his piece, the US has fallen from fifth in the world to twenty-second in broadband penetration. We pay more for slower access. Why? "The real reason things went wrong is that we haven't regulated our telecom markets properly," writes Thompson. And that, he continues, "is where John McCain comes in."

The problem is primarily the lack of competition among Internet providers. In most places, you have, at best, two choices—the local cable company or the local phone company. And these behemoths know that they don’t have to worry about new competitors. With the government’s help, they spent decades digging up roads and building lines into everyone’s home, creating an infrastructure that no start-up can replicate. Now they sit, fat and happy, neglecting customer service and innovating about as much each year as Google does each Tuesday.

None of this is to say John McCain is wrong in general (Ed's Note: But he is!), or to proffer an endorsement of Obama (Ed's Note: We'll be making that one later), only to point out that McCain's zealous adherence to a deregulate-at-all-costs philosophy has ill-served his country. By forcibly yanking the teeth out of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, McCain blocked the entry of smaller, more nimble competitors to the big Telecos, and goes a long way toward explaining why we receive such horrible customer service from our cell phone carriers and ISPs.

McCain’s mistakes derive partly from a lack of technological curiosity (he doesn’t use e-mail) and the presence of all sorts of Bell guys around him. His campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, Senate chief of staff, and chief political adviser have all worked as lobbyists for Verizon or AT&T.

Obama, by contrast, has presented a comprehensive and, for a politician, surprisingly sophisticated technology plan, including proposing the creation of a national CTO. Maybe we can convince Mayor-for-Life Mike Bloomberg to drop his bid for perpetual autocracy over New York and apply?