iCrowds » crowdsourcing

High pressure

Martijn Kriens — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:59:49 +0000

I suppose you all know the statement that during hard economic times that the economy has the flu (and as they say, when Germany sneezes we in Holland get pneumonia). Recently I wrote something about the flu monitor of Google.

Google also has recognised this resemblence between catching the flu and economic recession and has introduced an economic barometer. By paying attention to the nature of search words (new car is positive but occasion negative, vacation is good but golf vacation is better ..) they show the trend how people are feeling.

I suspect that this will work pretty good. The terms people use are very much dependent on how they feel at that moment so this barometer will say something about how the general population is feeling (or better, how the feeling changes over time). Sometimes they can be very mistaken of course (many people search for Ferrari’s without being able to buy them anyhow. I sometimes search for beautiful destinations for vacations I know I will not make. A little bit of dreaming is nice ..). But in general this really might work.

Looks like the recession wont be ending any time soon, now that makes me feeling depressed …

Surfing the beat

Martijn Kriens — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 08:30:07 +0000

I came across this post from David Cohn about crowdsourcing beat journalism. Local journalist of course normally have their network within the area they publish about. But how much more interesting might this become if you know how to make this network much more involved in the news and each other.

The same, in a way, counts for policemen. Especially community policeman need to have a strong social network in order to receive the subtle but important information on what is really going on in their district. But for quite some years it can be seen that policemen tend to have less social ties to the community they are serving. Most policemen do not live in the city they are working, are not member of the local football club and do not attend the local bar. Also the local policeman spends a lot of his time at the office.

Because of this we need to find new ways to connect the policeman to his local community. Social software has a great potential to deliver by connecting the policeman to a broad network of citizens that do have a intricate understanding of what is happening and have a strong interest in helping the police.

One of the ideas might be to let the local policeman write a blog. In this blog he can write about the major (public) issues he encounters and citizens can react by supplying extra information or commenting on it. This would be a way to actively help the local cop with information based on the priorities he states. You know the information matters and it gives a low threshold to supply it. In a way this looks a bit like a local cop in small town. Here the distance from the cop and the social community is small. In big cities this distance has grown but I think social software will lead to new strategies to cross that distance.

Connected cops …

Show me your books and I tell you who you are

Martijn Kriens — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 20:30:15 +0000

I always love to look at people their bookcases when I visit them. It normally tells quite a lot about someone what books they have collected over the years (and read of course).

Therefore it is quite interesting to see how sites like LibraryThing try to connect people by collecting information about the books you have read and how you tag them. This information is than used to connect people, get recommendations based on others input and yours. And of course show of your library on you blog (you guessed right, look in the left lower corner .

I wonder what yo can conclude by looking at the latest books I have read.

PANGEA DAY

Martijn Kriens — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 20:15:55 +0000

First have a look at the video:

The way I see it the idea behind this video is that until now images have been used for a lot of bad reasons. Their message on their website is:

So ask yourself this. If you had the entire world’s attention for just a few minutes, what story would you tell? Perhaps you think the world looks at you, your country and your culture… and just doesn’t understand. Then do something about it. Make a film and upload it here http://www.youtube.com/group/pangeaday. You never know. It could end up bringing millions of people that bit closer together.

The least you can say is that they are used to influence a lot of people at the same time. As they say: “images of the many have been in the hands of the few”. How extraordinary it would be to look through the eyes of other people around the world. Not the people in control of the big cameras but ordinary people like you in me. And in a way we can if you look at the video somebody makes when he wants to make a statement. Not through his eyes but through his lens.Have a look at their website. Somehow I like the idea a lot. One last quote which struck a chord with me:

Movies can’t change the world. But the people who watch them can.

Cookie jar

Martijn Kriens — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:00:20 +0000

I remember as a small child that, when you had taken some cookies from the cookie jar you were not supposed to take, your mother somehow always knew. I suppose this must feel the same for the people that got caught by the Wikiscanner.

This is an application that relates the IP adresses from the people who did edits on the Wiki pages. Surpringly (or maybe not so surprising really) a lot of edits come from organisations that are involved in the wiki-article and their intentions are not always without self interest. The page of George W. Bush was edited from the home security office (removal of the fact that he had a drinking problem) and the best of all about the edit from the queen’s home address where information from her daughter-in-law Mabel was edited to make her look a little better.

This all is of course not surprising. When information can be edited there is no reason to think companies and people will not do so in order to make them look better. The interesting part is that it turns out that many of the un-truthful edits had been discovered very quickly and have been repaired withing hours and sometimes even minutes.

Also, the wikiscanner is a new step that “the crowd” can and will use to make the information more trustworthy. More transparency will lead to better information. Not perfect but still a little bit better and better to judge.

These are for example the edits from the Telematica Instituut (looks like we have a lot of mathematicians in the company or are these the edits of one person?). Interesting…

The oldest book

Martijn Kriens — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 13:19:05 +0000

Imagine: the oldest book in the world (I think?) being digitized through crowdsourcing.

in 1637 in the Netherlands 22 man have translated the bible from the original texts to normal Dutch (they took 20 years for this). This was quite remarkable at the time since it was not normal to translate religious texts into a language that people could understand. This translation was so important and famous that it has influenced the dutch (written) language significantly.

This original translation has been changed during the centuries and some researchers would like to be able to compare the copies. But at this moment the original is only available in scanned pictures. The idea now is that many volunteers will type over text from the scanned pages. This work is organized by Nicoline van der Sijs. 1418 pages are easy to do when you can activate the many people that are interested in this work (not just from a religious perspective but definitely also from a language perspective).

Anybody willing to participate: nvdsijs@euronet.nl