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{ tag Archives } crowdsourcing

Longing for latitude

One of the interesting features of technologies is how it can bring people close together, in real life as well as in perception. Google has an interesting new feature called Google Latitude. Through this service you can show your location to your friends and of course see the location that your friends are sharing with you. Interesting feature is that the application has a fine grained way of setting your privacy in relation to the various friends that you have. This I think is a general direction you see in web 2.0 that more and more people are becoming concerned about privacy and about who really are your friends you are willing to share all. In the past I used an application called IYOUIT that was also capable of showing this like this. To me it was surprising how much feeling is involved in knowing precisely where your friends are.
2009 02 05 Martijn Kriens Social Software
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Surfing the beat

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
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2007 11 02 Martijn Kriens crowdsourcingTags: , , Comments (0)

Citizen Journalism 2

They made it! The group of people from AssignmentZero I blogged about some time ago have their articles published on Wired. Though it is easy to see that it has been a mixed blessing in results it is also easy to see the enthusiasm people have in doing this. One of the conclusion they have reached is that a good balance or professionals and amateurs is crucial. The professionals know how to present news, the amateurs are everywhere where news may be found. Read more about it here. Also, we have an example of this trend in the Netherlands. They recently published an ad in the newspaper "DAG" for citizen journalist to cover news from the "Tour de France". I think that is an excellent combination of enthusiastic amateurs covering many locations with phone camera's in combination with a professional editorial team. All sides win: the amateur have a great time while watching the tour with a missions and the newspaper gets wider coverage of the news. Lot's of people love producing instead of just consuming.
2007 07 09 Martijn Kriens Social Software
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The oldest book

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
2007 06 19 Martijn Kriens crowdsourcingTags: Comments (0)

Talent and Scarcity

Open Source, Wikipedia and others attract lots of people who spent lots of time in adding information and improvements. All for zilch, noppes, nada. At least financial terms... Some think this is the way of the future. All new paradigms first attract the idealistic people. In the first days of the Internet commerce was simply not done. Flame wars should not be stopped by imposing rules and enforcement but by netiquette. Funny thing is that many of these idealistic first users also happen to be a bit anarchistic. This seems logical because these are the people that venture into the uncharted territories precisely because of the lack of rules there. I feel sympathetic to that. While reading the book of Yochai Bankler you get the feeling that we are on a new era of the altruistic society. I would love to believe this but I don't buy it. In 1982 Güth, Werner, Schmittberger, and Schwarze wrote an essay with the title: “An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining,” (Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 3:4 (December), page 367). In this they laid down a special version of economic game theory called the ultimatum game. The game goes like this: There are two ...
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2007 06 04 Martijn Kriens social networksTags: , , Comments (0)

The future workspace of journalism

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times". Many will recognize this as the opening of Dickens his book "A tale of two cities". Dickens meant the time of the french revolution with all the positive and negative turmoil. Looking how fast the landscape of work is changing I sometimes get the same idea (though luckily the "blood" is now virtual!). An interesting example of the change and turmoil is a site called AssignmentZero, a cooperation between Newassignment and Wired. The idea of AssigmentZero is an attempt to do "open source journalism". The idea is that an open community communicates about what would be interesting subjects, whom to interview, what are important questions and all other aspects relating to journalism. There is some leadership but there is also a lot of confusion, searching, irritation and of course some flames. It is intriguing to see how these people embark on a journey together to redefine how journalism works in a networked world. This is how they define their quest: The investigation takes place in the open, not behind newsroom walls. Participation is voluntary; contributors are welcome from across the Web. The people getting, telling ...
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2007 05 25 Martijn Kriens workspaceTags: , , Comments (1)

Crowdsourcing

One of the most interesting developments of the moment is I think Crowd-sourcing. In Crowd-sourcing you outsource work to un undefined number of people in an open call. Amazon for example has created a function called "Amazon Mechanical Turk". The idea here is that tasks that humans can do easily (is this a picture of a woman or man?) but that are extremely hard for computers are outsourced to the public (and you get paid doing it). Interesting variants are for example the google image labeler where, in the form of a game, people have to guess the keywords for a picture. When both players fill in the same keyword you get points. This has of course very little to do with the intelligence of crowds but capitalizes on the mass of people willing spend some of their time. For either some money, for fun or for eternal fame by reaching the high score. Question is if this model is feasible in the long run. People work on Wikipedia and open source software since these are environments where everybody works for free. In the case that crowd-sourcing is used by companies than money ...
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2007 05 24 Martijn Kriens Social SoftwareTags: Comments (0)