CIRCA:Crowdsourcing Literature

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''Shirky, Clay. "Here Comes Everybody." The Penguin Press: New York. 2008.''
''Shirky, Clay. "Here Comes Everybody." The Penguin Press: New York. 2008.''
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*A crowd can be our army: The tale of Evan and Ivanne vs. Sasha - the tale of the stolen sidekick.
=="The Meaning of Everything"==
=="The Meaning of Everything"==
''Winchester, Simon. "The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford Dictionary." Oxford University Press: New York. 2003.''
''Winchester, Simon. "The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford Dictionary." Oxford University Press: New York. 2003.''
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*The compilation of the Oxford Dictionary: "There were... no fewer than 1, 827, 306 illustrative quotations listed - selected from five million offered by thousands of volunteer readers and literary woolgatherers - that showed just how and when the uses and senses and meanings of all these words had begun and evolved... These were essential: the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked...(Winchester, 2003)
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Revision as of 00:12, 4 March 2011

Contents

"The Long Tail"

Anderson, Chris. “The Long Tail.” Wired October 2004. Issue 12.10. Web. 16 Feb. 2011.

This article by Chris Anderson discusses the long tail effect in entertainment (including books, movies, music, and television). He asserts that companies such as amazon.com and Netflix combine mass-market hits with obscure unknowns to create a “long tail.” A facilitator of this effect is Amazon’s customer recommendations, which applies “infinite shelf space with real time info about buying trends and public opinion.” Anderson then provides rules that these companies should follow:

  • 1. Make everything available. To break the tyranny of physical space.
  • 2. Cut the price in half. Now lower it. “Pull consumers down the tail with lover prices.”
  • 3. Help me find it. You need to have both the big hits and the unknown to influence users to go down the long tail.

"The Wealth of Networks"

Benkler, Yochai. "The Wealth of Networks:How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom." Yale University Press: New Haven. 2006.

  • Arranged into three parts to inform the reader on the shift of "social economic production (Benkler, 2006).

"Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One"

Catone, Josh. “Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One.” Read Write Web 22 March 2007. Web. 18 Feb. 2011.

This blog post by Josh Catone divides crowdsourcing into three categories.

  • 1. Creation, crowdsourcing projects that use the masses to create. Wikipedia is an example.
  • 2. Prediction, uses the crowd to guess events, this includes both stock markets and sporting events. Picks Pal is an example.
  • 3. Organization, the best example of this is Google, which uses “…crowds to determine which websites are the most relevant.”

Catone then refers to one of his past blog posts, a list of steps that crowdsourcing projects should follow to ensure success. The are “Crowds should operate within constraints,” “Not everything can be democratic,” “Crowds must retain their individuality,” and “Crowds are better at vetting content than creating it.”

"Crowdsourcing"

Howe, Jeff. "Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business." Crown Business: New York. 2008.

  • Divided into three sections: the past ("How we got here"), the present ("Where we are"), and the future ("Where We're Going").
  • While a strong supporter of crowdsourcing, this book does not sugar coat the problems. Crowdsourcing needs to be organized and applied correctly to produce the best results. You cannot use just any crowd, if you need a logo designed go to people with artistic or creative talents; if you need 10000 emails sent you go to somewhere like Mechanical Turk where that can happen for one hundred dollars (not wasting you or the crowds time with ill suited tasks). And lets be realistic the crowd can (or is) stupid, the anonymity of the Internet brings out the worst in people, so "keep it simple" and understand that most of the work you will get it crap - the "90 - 10 rule."
  • Crowdsourcing projects mentioned: American Idol (love it!), Assignment Zero, InnoCentive, Google, Del.icio.us, IdeaStorm, Cambrian House, etc.
  • Four things had to exist for crowdsourcing to grow:
    • "The rise of the amateur class was accompanied by the emergence of a mode of production - open source software - that provided inspiration and practical direction (Howe, 2008)."
    • The internet and availability of "cheap tools" gave users more power, that which businesses and companies once solely held (Howe, 2008).
    • "Online Communities" that organized people into convenient groups that encouraged crowdsourcing (Howe, 2008).

"The Rise of Crowdsourcing"

Howe, Jeff. “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” Wired June 2006. Issue 14.06. Web. 16 Feb. 2011.

Jeff Howe’s article is an influential document on crowdsourcing. He divides the article into four parts.

  • 1. The Professional, Howe describes how professionals are taking advantage of the networked world. In addition, now “Technology advantages… are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals.”
  • 2. The Package, how crowdsourcing can be used to “package” and present other crowdsourcing media. The example Howe gave was Web Junk 2.0; a half an hour TV show that brings together the best (aka the funniest and weirdest) viral videos to the web.
  • 3. The Tinkerer, using crowdsourcing to match up companies with people who can solve the problems that their own research and developing employees cannot. InnoCentive is one of these crowdsourcing websites; it offers money to those who come up with solutions.
  • 4. The Masses, this is project like InnoCentive but for everyone, no one needs any specialty knowledge to do tasks. Mechanical Turk with amazon.com pays participants pennies to do menial work, like emailing for large companies.

"Tachypaedia Byzantian: The Suda On Line as Collaborative Encyclopedia"

Mahoney, Anne. “Tachypaedia Byzantian: The Suda On Line as Collaborative Encyclopedia.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly Winter 2009. Volume 3 Number 1. Web. 16 Feb. 2011.

This is an article about Suda On Line, a project that applies the crowd to translating the Byzantine Greek Suda. Throughout this article, there is no mention of term crowdsourcing, but there are reference to common issues found in similar projects. The article described experiencing “the long tail” and motivation issues. The main participants of this project are university students (both graduate and undergraduate). The idea came out of a listserv question about an English version of the Suda, and developed when interest from a computer science graduate student surfaced.

"Tapping the Wisdom of the Crowd"

Rich, Laura. “Tapping the Wisdom of the Crowd.” The New York Times 4 Aug. 2010. Web. 15 Feb. 2011.

This article by Laura Rich begins by talking about examples of companies using crowdsourcing projects to solve problems they are having. For instance, Trek Light Gear presents itself as a large company, but it has a small backend. This company used Napkin Labs (a company that uses the crowd to evaluate other companies products and provides suggestions) to look at whether the company should expand and what products they should focus on developing. She then goes on to give some general pointers like “defining the job,” “Find a partner in the crowd,” “Hone your goal,” “Pay attention,” and “pay for what you get,”

"Here Comes Everybody"

Shirky, Clay. "Here Comes Everybody." The Penguin Press: New York. 2008.

  • A crowd can be our army: The tale of Evan and Ivanne vs. Sasha - the tale of the stolen sidekick.

"The Meaning of Everything"

Winchester, Simon. "The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford Dictionary." Oxford University Press: New York. 2003.

  • The compilation of the Oxford Dictionary: "There were... no fewer than 1, 827, 306 illustrative quotations listed - selected from five million offered by thousands of volunteer readers and literary woolgatherers - that showed just how and when the uses and senses and meanings of all these words had begun and evolved... These were essential: the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked...(Winchester, 2003)
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