Arun Jiwa @ 18-06-2008
Think of this as R&D in real time. Says Nokia:
Spotting an opportunity to make their phones more indispensable to consumers, Nokia is investing in crowd sourcing. It sees the most promise in services that leverage global positioning system (GPS) technology, mapping and the mobile Web.
and furthermore:
People are using their cellphones to review restaurants, share their favorite hometown hangouts, discover new jogging routes, even dodge speeding tickets…”Mobile is about pushing that even further out to the ultimate edge: an individual, at all times, with his device.” Such crowd-sourced applications point up the power of mobile networks to relay data in real time. “Nearly everyone has a mobile that they carry with them all the time,”"Phones are perfectly suited for this type of automated reporting, and potentially a much more pervasive device than the online Web.”
How will they go about using crowd sourcing in developing smart applications? Well, consider this:
Crowds are now being tapped to develop mobile applications before they reach consumers. Mob4Hire connects developers with new applications with tech-savvy testers around the world. Founder Paul Poutanen estimates there are 12,000 different cellphone models and 700 different wireless carriers globally, forming a byzantine system that can take two years to navigate. Mob4Hire’s decentralized system helps developers deliver new applications to consumers faster and catch bugs along the way.
Honestly, the coolest thing about this is the real time nature of the testing. Crowd sourcing seems to be the most organic extension for testing out these so called smart applications, and it will be interesting to see what new projects come along, as more developers jump onboard.
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Paul Raven @ 19-02-2008
Steve Rubel points us to an article at American Journalism Review that discusses the hazards of newsrooms relying on Wikipedia for research and citations. [Image by rabbleradio]
This is hardly a new story (though usually we hear about the horrors of students rather than journalists citing the online encyclopedia), but it’s not going away any time soon - in the always-on 24/7 culture of the web, the only constant is change. As Rubel puts it:
“The big question in my mind is this: when journalists cite Wikipedia articles, what happens when the facts they reference from the wiki entries change (assuming they do)? Do the reporters go back and update their articles? The news reports call more attention to the articles, potentially opening up a can of worms each time they source Wikipedia.
Seems like a big vicious cycle. Perhaps in the future these stories will carry some of the same disclaimers that Wikipedia lists.”
And if you think that’s a symptom of postmodernism running wild, what about CNN handing over the reins of iReport to the community of citizen-journalists who contribute to it? [Via SlashDot]
Are the definitions of “truth” and “consensus” converging? Were they ever really different?
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Jeremy Lyon @ 04-08-2007
What’s the cartography of your life? Google and many others want you to contribute to their mapping solutions. I won’t try to improve on Brady Forrest’s write up at O’Reilly Radar, except to say that if you haven’t checked out the Open Street Map yet, you should.
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Paul Raven @ 31-07-2007
Here’s a different sort of crowdsourcing. The “Crowd Farm” is the brainchild of two MIT architecture students, and it’s a system designed to harness the physical movements of large masses of people and turn it into usable electricity - imagine contributing to the metro station’s lighting by climbing the stairs, for example. It’s a great idea - and like a lot of great ideas, a couple of people have thought of it already. Let’s hope any arguments over patents don’t get in the way of something that can reduce our collective carbon footprints, eh? [Image by yeuxrouge]
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Paul Raven @ 31-07-2007
It’s a brave business that openly announces its intent to beat Google at their main game. But Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is nothing if not a man of vision - his commercial start-up Wikia is currently assembling the base of a distributed web-search facility which will be enhanced by its users, in the form of human editors who will clarify ambiguous results.
We hear a lot about crowdsourcing from its supporters and detractors alike, and the jury is still out on Wikipedia’s reliability for that very reason. But one thing’s for certain - there’ll be a lot of SEO consultants with a vested interest in this project not doing so well. Ever seen a wiki-war? Now, just imagine the sort of intense conflict that paid shills could produce over search results … and the potential income a bribe-taking editor could make …
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Paul Raven @ 16-07-2007
Crowdsourcing is one of the slew of neologisms that the past year or so has thrown up - and like a lot of neologisms, everyone who uses it seems to have a different idea of what it means. WIRED attempted to put theory into practice in the field of ‘citizen journalism’ by crowdsourcing a series of articles on crowdsourcing - very meta. While they got some pretty interesting articles out of it, including an
interview with Douglas Rushkoff in which he writes off the term as a way for corporations to get work done for free, it didn’t work out to be the bed of roses they had hoped - the dissection of the project is well worth reading.
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