Power of the Crowds

I read an interesting Wired news story today about the rise of crowdsourcing. It seems the power of the net these days is all about the power of the crowd. Sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, flickr, and many, many others not only exist, but thrive because of the intelligence that rises from the masses. Thousands of people upload videos, but the best rise to the top as the masses vote for favorites. More and more, the power of the crowd is being harnessed in new ways, leaving us potentially on the verge of a cultural and societal shift, a shift that’s bigger than the next great viral video, greater than the most popular bookmarks; it’s one that could rapidly push forward innovation as discoveries aren’t made by one person working alone, solving one problem. Instead, problems, tasks, and other challenges are presented to the online world, and just as "Lazy Sunday" rose to the top, so will the most innovative solutions. Collective intelligence, paticipatory learning…"crowdsourcing," (a term coined by the Wired article.)

One example of crowdsourcing is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, an online marketplace that helps companies find people to perform tasks that computers can’t do, like "identifying items in a photograph, skimming real estate documents to find identifying information, writing short product descriptions, transcribing podcasts. Amazon calls the tasks HITs (human intelligence tasks); they’re designed to require very little time, and consequently they offer very little compensation – most from a few cents to a few dollars." (quoting Wired)

Another program exists at a site called InnoCentive, which has been around for 5 years now. InnoCentive helps companies connect with people outside their scope for help with the trickiest R&D problems. Companies like Boeing, DuPont, and Procter & Gamble pose their R&D problems and pay "solvers" anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 per solution. Often, these "solvers" are regular folks, hobbyists, self-taught scientists, whose specific skill sets lead to innovative solutions.

So, is this what web 2.0 really brings us? Not just flashy AJAX websites, but a new online culture of participation. Participating benefits you, and benefits everyone as you tag and vote, solve and query, upload, download, blog and podcast. We’re not just surfing the web anonymously anymore. We’re citizens building a new community — each of us a worker bee, contributing to the hive.

The question is not "are you participating?", but how. Because if you’re not participating at all, you’re not really ONLINE, are you?

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed