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Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing
Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D. By Jeff HowePage 1 of 4 next » 1. The Professional Story Tools Story Images Click thumbnails for full-size image: Claudia Menashe needed pictures of sick people. In October 2004, she ran across a stock photo collection by Mark Harmel, a freelance photographer living in Manhattan Beach, California. The National Health Museum has grand plans to occupy a spot on the National Mall in Washington by 2012, but for now it’s a fledgling institution with little money. After several weeks of back-and-forth, Menashe emailed Harmel to say that, regretfully, the deal was off. iStockphoto, which grew out of a free image-sharing exchange used by a group of graphic designers, had undercut Harmel by more than 99 percent. He can’t, of course. It took a while for Harmel to recognize what was happening.

Distributed Productino (Gutenberg project) Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) The Trustees of Distributed Proofreaders Foundation are concerned about a new international agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP will result in significant copyright term extensions in signatory countries, which will have the immediate impact of slowing or halting growth of the public domain in many parts of the world. The agreement was drafted in secret. Follow the Distributed Proofreaders Blog on Twitter: Site Concept Distributed Proofreaders provides a web-based method to ease the conversion of Public Domain books into e-books. During proofreading, volunteers are presented with a scanned page image and the corresponding OCR text on a single web page. Once all the pages have completed these steps, a post-processor carefully assembles them into an e-book, optionally makes it available to interested parties for 'smooth reading', and submits it to the Project Gutenberg archive. How You Can Help Volunteering at Distributed Proofreaders

Logo Design, Web Design and More. Design Done Differently | 99designs.com Heineken TopCoder---Crowdsourcing Software Long Before Crowdsourcing Got Cool Wade Roush4/23/09 Can competitions and prizes get you to the Moon? Google thinks so—it’s backing the $30 million Lunar X Prize, which will be awarded to the first privately funded team that sends a remote-controlled robot to the Moon, drives it 500 meters, and collects video of the trip. Back here on Earth, the $10 million Archon X Prize is being offered to the first team that can build a device that sequences 100 human genomes in 10 days or less, and the Wellpoint Foundation is proposing a $10 million Healthcare X Prize for the first organization that figures out how to deliver a 50 percent improvement in the cost-effectiveness of community healthcare over a three-year period. But in Glastonbury, CT, there’s a company called TopCoder with a prize-based business model that predates all of these efforts. The model is so successful that it’s attracting the attention of business scholars from Harvard, MIT, and other academic centers.

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Dell The Next Evolution in Crowdsourcing As we get closer to reaching the critical milestone of 40,000 testers in the uTest community (any day now!), we knew we’d have to find ways to scale our community programs in order to manage, vet and engage our enormous pool of expert testers and QA professionals. Well, we didn’t have to look very far! The answers were right in front of us — where else but within the uTester community itself. From there, we launched three new initiatives – Sandbox, Crash Courses, and Test Team Lead – which catapulted uTest into the next phase of crowdsourcing, one that is self-sufficient, self-teaching, and self-policing. One that is “For uTesters, By uTesters.” For example, the Test Team Lead program gives uTest members the opportunity to earn paid leadership roles, mentoring and helping other testers succeed in their work. Check out some early thoughts from the media on TechTarget, Crowdsourcing.org, TheDailyCrowdsource. Details on each program after the bump!

Foldit Doctor Crowdsourcing Afgelopen donderdag promoveerde Irma Borst op haar proefschrift “Understanding Crowdsourcing; The effects of motivation and rewards on performance in voluntary online activities”, aan de Erasmus Universiteit van Rotterdam. Een promotieonderzoek duurt toch minstens een jaar of 4 en dan is het opmerkelijk als iemand een onderwerp kiest – zoals Crowdsourcing – dat als woord nog niet bestaat bij aanvang in 2007, en bij voltooiing een modern, hip woord is geworden. Irma mag zich dus kortweg Doctor in de Crowdsourcing noemen. Bij mijn weten is zij daarmee de eerste en voorlopig enige in de wereld. Irma begint haar verdediging met de grap dat crowdsurfing toch echt heel wat anders is, hoewel een journalist die haar interviewde daarmee in de war was. Irma gebruikt de definitie van Crowdsourcing zoals Jeff Howe hem ooit als eerste formuleerde: ‘Crowdsourcing is het uitbesteden van bedrijfsactiviteiten aan vrijwilligers die via het internet daartoe worden opgeroepen.’ Zij geeft 2 voorbeelden:

Concepto Crowdsourced Software A new crowdsourcing company, called Cambrian House, launched this week. The idea is pretty straightforward – open source software development minus the free labor. It's a little hard to evaluate whether Cambrian House can develop competitive applications in an increasingly crowded market, but I'm impressed with the degree to which they've thought out the model. I also like that they intend to put the crowd to work at three separate tasks: 1) originating the ideas; 2) evaluating the ideas; and 3) developing the code itself. Postscript: I hope my regular readers will forgive the lapse between posts. My goal is to never let more than a week elapse and, if significant or interesting developments occur, post in as reactive a manner possible.

ShortTask.Com Wiki's Waarheid Google of Wikipedia? Wie zoekt op internet - en wie doet dat niet?- wordt steeds vaker verwezen naar Wikipedia. Deze gratis online ‘volksencyclopedie’ is sinds twee jaar de snelste stijger op lijstjes van meest bezochte websites. In deze uitzending gaat IJsbrand van Veelen op zoek naar de waarheid van en achter Wikipedia. Betekent dit het einde van de autoriteit van traditionele kennisinstituten als de Britannnica? In Wiki’s Waarheid interviews met de hoofdrolspelers in het debat: Jimmy Wales (oprichter en opper Wikipediaan), Larry Sanger (inmiddels vertrokken medeoprichter Wikipedia, nu Citizendium), Andrew Keen (schrijver van ‘The Cult of the Amateur. Uit deze interviews blijkt dat de kwestie Wikipedia in feite staat voor een groter discours rondom het fenomeen ‘Web 2.0’, waarin de gebruiker de inhoud maakt en bepaalt wat op elk moment het interessantst is.

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