Just in case October 16, 2007
Posted by Rob Ponte in crowdsourcing.add a comment
I found some neat stuff we may want to be partially familiar with, although its probably not important or similar enough to put into the presentation, someone may mention them.
gather.com – is a social networking site for writers, most of them appear to be semi- or wannabe semi-professional. There is no integrated collaboration system but there probably is some going on.
We are Smarter than Me – is a book published from a wiki project about harnessing crowdsourcing for profit. Which is exactly what the publisher has tried to do.
New Zealand add to the script … October 13, 2007
Posted by charlotteanne in crowdsourcing, interactivity, presentation.2 comments
May i suggest an addition to the script.
New Zealand, as Hepi noted earlier, has introduced an experiment in what is being termed “extreme Democracy” by opening its Police Act in a public Wiki for proposed revisions.
It’s pretty amazing, and worth noting as an example of how they are working to bring citizens into the process to create change (which, if memory serves, was your germ). So how about a screenshot from the New Zealand Wiki Web site and a few words in the script?
Ways to get interviews October 8, 2007
Posted by rebeccaperez in announcements, crowdsourcing, demographics, participatory journalism, presentation.add a comment
One of my friends suggested doing a search on YouTube under community, then put in your school name, so that you get a list of people who have posted video to that site. You could do the same with MySpace. I am sending out messages to people on YouTube right now, just wanted to let you know about this idea while I was thinking about it. Hope this helps.
Fort Myers News Press Crowd-Sourcing September 29, 2007
Posted by Brian in crowdsourcing, hyper-local, interactivity.2 comments
I took a look at the News-Press branch in Fort Myers (I hope this is the site you mentioned, Jonathon) . Part of their site is a crowd-sourcing experiment. As expected, people post news, comment on those stories and discuss.
Sort of.
News-Press started it in 2005 (I assume, since the admin. first joined the board then). It uses phpBB, which is forum software that’s been around for a while. It looks and feels just like a forum, which is kind of drab.
The Fort Myers site isn’t using it in any spectacular, new way. People do post news items, but I believe that the medium is not suited for engaging interactivity in the news area. phpBB belongs to niches even nichier than news. There’s even spam. And the picture section is not news related, really. People post pictures of everything .
I’m giving the generation gap and a lack of people who use or want to use this as the reasons why they’re failing. It reminds me of our phone meetings and talking over AIM: it’s too choppy and broken. Perhaps a reason why people moved to video is that it seems to relieve some of that linear feeling.
September 24, 2007
Posted by Brian in crowdsourcing, tools.2 comments
Last night I mentioned something about people getting notified if there were a story in their area (or maybe someone else said this, I don’t recall), but it made me think of this great tool used for getting at nacho niche markets.
Questions? Comments? Concerns?
(Edit: So … WP deleted the embedded video. I’ll put it in again, and if it doesn’t work, just go here)
New-ish Social News Sites September 1, 2007
Posted by Brian in competition, crowdsourcing.add a comment
Read the whole story or just look at the Digg-related ones.
Plime: a pliable tree of interesting links, cultivated and pruned by everyone.
Shoutwire: offers more options for user-submitted content – including forums for discussion and on-site editorials.
Internet and Memes August 20, 2007
Posted by Brian in crowdsourcing, memes.add a comment
Here’s an interesting read that tries to break apart memes.
Some basics from it:
- Because the Internet is made for communication, it becomes a perfect way to store, carry, create, link, remember and replicate memes.
- There are memes in many layers of the Internet:
- The operational level (the physical network and the routing that takes place there): anything that is an information pattern is essentially a meme. The Internet uses special pieces of information to decide the best way to send something with the state of the ‘net. If a network is down over which information would have been sent, the information has to go another way to its destination.
- The service level (websites / bots / programs): Google is a meme because it holds a tremendous amount of information patterns. It looks at what people mean by a given phrase and knows that they mean site A, not site B, even though they both have the same word in it. Site A is catchier than the other. Services have to work together, thus creating “memeplexes”. These memes have to work together to do their own tasks, but they also work with other memes to solve theirs. Interestingly, they end up modifying each other to do tasks more efficiently: instead of each one queuing their own tasks to do, they can work together to gather the information all of them need with fewer resources.
- The user level: the Internet is only a supplemental way to transmit memes. It can transmit memes differently because of the medium. The rapidity of memes’ spreading makes for a homogeneous world culture. Some memes are worth more, and it’s usually the ones with less long-term value.
Some Google Toys and Crowdsourcing August 16, 2007
Posted by Brian in crowdsourcing, interactivity, mashups.2 comments
Two new Google services are Google Base and Google Mashup Editor (which is a closed beta right now. I signed up and received the invite rather quickly, though.) They’re not really anything new, but we should know what’s on the table already. It’s embarrassing to be the fifth person with pasta salad, eh?
Base is like a more diverse Flickr: upload files and tag them. The key here is that the items, whether already online or not, are added to Google’s servers. People could search for an XML file, and if the content and tags are right, they could find yours. Not so revolutionary.
Google Mashup Editor is their version of Yahoo! Pipes or Microsoft’s PopFly. The three seem to cater to different crowds: GME gets the coders, Pipes gets programmers (because of its roots in UNIX) and more general people, and PopFly gets a more general population still. It took 6 lines of code to add a list (an XML file, really) of people and their locations and a map with those places mapped. I’ll toy with it this weekend and try to see what people use it for.
Google put these out somewhat silently, I think, but word-of-mouth and other viral advertisement does the job for them.
(Does anyone know if it’s better to be quit-ish about releases versus loud and proud?)
Regarding crowdsourcing, Google will pay you $10 to take pictures of shops in your area, along with gathering some data about its operations, presumably to use it on their maps. What a way to get those especially small towns.
Publish2: I think We thought of You, Too August 15, 2007
Posted by Brian in competition, crowdsourcing, participatory journalism.1 comment so far
Publish2 will be / is a social network for journalists, bloggers and the like “which aims to put journalists at the center of news on the web by creating a journalist-powered news aggregator.”
They have an extensive blog entry tonight explaining their reasons for creating such a site, so here’s the summary.
- Rise of Aggregation
- There’s too much information for people
- Search rules because it aggregates the “best” media
- Algorithms aren’t good enough for news (yet)
- Sites like Digg aren’t as wide-sweeping as they could be–it’s too hierarchical
- Human intelligence [paralel processing] is the innovation of the Web, now
- The WHO Problem
- Digg is too nichey to attract enough people
- Some are better at filtering news than others
- How do you reach more niches? Use the people that did so before: Journalists
- What’s a Journalist?
- “Journalist” means mainstream people as well as independent news bloggers
- There shouldn’t be an “us vs. them” attitude between these people
- The site will allow users to determine who are the best
- Networking Journalism
- The network has become the medium
- People are also the medium
- Professional journalism is fragmented: “Journalism has not yet embraced the network”
- Journalists remain in the bunkers of their corporations [We're not using creation nets]
- Journalists need to have more media friends by taking use of social media
- Publish2 will help it evolve more than it is
- Creating Value for J’s
- Optimize the network for J’s by making it “targeted” and “community-defined”
- It would allow users to display the self while displaying their corporation as well
- Better productivity tools [?]
- Creating Value for “Citizens”
- News for any niche at any time through “collective wisdom of the world’s journalists”
- Balancing between old and new media
I imagine that this will be extremely monumentous monumental in the J world. Keep pointing your browser back over the next couple of weeks.
Living in the Cambrian Is Wicket August 13, 2007
Posted by Brian in competition, crowdsourcing, participatory journalism.3 comments
Our top story tonight: “wicket” doesn’t sound enough like “wicked”.
Our other top story is crowdsourcing at Cambrian House and IdeaWicket. I took a few hours to try them out.
Cambrian House’s users are more in the market of online ideas. There were … a lot of terrible ones (like a site that would let you upload videos or pictures of deceased pets. The site then uses software to make a 3D model and sends a carving to you), but some were ideas that were much more realizable (such as the P2P cell phone network [which has been discussed elsewhere in the digital world, but I'll let it slide]). Vote for an idea, put one in IdeaWarz, have people talk and be cynical about it, turn it into a business. And more.
IdeaWicket has more concrete innovations. Do you need a chair that folds into a desk? Is pizza in a cup a good idea? (No.) Want a more ergonomic tattoo-giving device? This is the place for RL solutions. Already established businesses can even contact innovators about their products. Or steal them.
Security is the biggest issue with the sites: no one can really protect anything you create. Considering that both sites are essentially what we’re doing, I prefer our Incubation, since it has a few layers of closure surrounding it. Either way, both sites have a lot of people visiting them, but it mostly let me know what other people are looking for or trying to design on the web. Nothing on either place was paradigm shifting, either.
Still looking for the missing link.
