Category — Insights

What do you get when you cross User Generated Content and a virtual sweatshop right out of a digital Charles Dickens? You get “Crowdsourcing”, although the Dickens analogy is more me taking a glass-half-empty approach to where this form of click collaboration could eventually go. And actually it’s not new, since the British government first harnessed it as a way to solve the longitude problem in 1714.

Crowdsourcing is a taking a task, many times relatively unskilled, and outsourcing it to a wide range of volunteers (paid or otherwise) via the web. The P&G example from this post is crowdsourcing done with experts who exist outside a company’s structure. There are ways to experience crowdsourcing through click collaboration first hand, however, without being an expert and with minimal setup. The first two are ones I’ve dabble in and found interesting, and the third is one I haven’t done, but follows the same vein:

1. Find Steve Fossett: Using the Mechanical Turk site from Amazon, anyone can participate in the search for adventurer Steve Fossett’s plane by scanning satellite photos of the Nevada backcountry for evidence of where it may have gone down.
2. Classify the Universe: With a brief tutorial and a short quiz at Galaxy Zoo, you can help astrophysicists from Oxford University classify millions of galaxies into spirals or ellipticals with images from the Sloan Sky Survey.
3. Help Create a Digital Library: By proofreading digitized texts at Distributed Proofreaders, you can help Project Gutenberg, a wiki dedicated to bringing free e-books to the web.

1. It’s not just the kids:
   In this post from the Center of Media Research, a Deloitte study finds 56% of Millenials (13-24) creating their own entertainment. Not surprising. But it also cites 25% of Matures (61-75) as participating in User Generated Content as well.  Certainly a challenge to dated notions of who is doing what on the web.
2. It’s on the move:
   Participants in UGC are no longer tethered to their computers. In this post on eMarketer, a Juniper Research study predicts mobile end user generated revenues will grow to more the $5.7 billion by 2012.  Social networking will be about half of that.
3. It can generate big business ideas:
   Through it’s Connect+Develop site, 50% of P&G’s new product innovations have benefited in part from externally developed ideas.  Even old guard companies are realizing the “Wisdom of Crowds”.