Using the general public to do research or other work, which may or may not be paid. For example, Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com) enables people to enter a task description and an amount they will pay for its completion. A body of workers (the Turks; the crowd) peruse the job list and fulfill the tasks. InnoCentive (www.innocentive.com) enlists scientists worldwide to do research for pharmaceutical, biotech, agribusiness and other companies. Awards are issued for solutions that best meet requirements.
Elicit the Crowd
The term may also refer to user-generated content. For example, if a natural disaster strikes an area, locals can capture and upload images before a professional news crew arrives. In addition, rather than hire a professional poll taker, using a Web site or blog to ask the public for an opinion may often be the fastest way to generate comments and suggestions. See user-generated content, Mechanical Turk and Google Answers.
Elicit the Crowd
The term may also refer to user-generated content. For example, if a natural disaster strikes an area, locals can capture and upload images before a professional news crew arrives. In addition, rather than hire a professional poll taker, using a Web site or blog to ask the public for an opinion may often be the fastest way to generate comments and suggestions. See user-generated content, Mechanical Turk and Google Answers.
 | Reproduced with permission from Computer Desktop Encyclopedia. Copyright (c) 1981-2009 The Computer Language Company Inc. All rights reserved. |
Additional Resources
- Is Wikipedia maxed out?
- Wikipedia may have reached the upper limits of what can be done with crowdsourcing, according to a researcher in Spain. by Larry Dignan
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- Discussion threads 2009-09-06
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- Discussion threads 2009-08-19
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- Sometimes I read something and it makes me smile from ear to ear, most often because it generates another of those ah-ha moments that keep tech people motivated. Reading Vinnie Mirchandani's SCARS: SaaS and Cloud Allowance Rebate System was one of those moments. Much as I am tempted...
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- Is crowdsourcing a better choice for grading?
- Today, tomorrow and self interestWith peer reviews, the problem is that the reviewers won't dare to criticize strongly. Or even at all...Their self interest is at stake: today they are the reviewers, but tomorrow their work will be reviewed by the same person whose work they are reviewing now. In...
- Discussion threads 2009-08-07
- News to know: Twitter DOS attack; Cisco and IBM, Clunkers, Win 7 chart; Murdoch; CTO
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- Blog posts 2009-08-07
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- According to an article I stumbled across tonight, one Duke University professor thinks so. In a blog post, the professor, Dr. Cathy Davidson, writes, I loved returning to teaching last year after several years in administration . . . except for the grading. I can't...
- Blog posts 2009-08-06
- Web Squared: Web 2.0's Successor?
- Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle discussed their vision and nomenclature for the next iteration of the web in a webinar last Thursday: I believe the recording will be available online sometime this week, slides are above. With the term 'Web 2.0' enjoying its fifth birthday...
- Blog posts 2009-06-28
- (Images: Crowdsourcing for car design)
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- Discussion threads 2009-06-23
- A Twitter driven social experiment
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- Blog posts 2009-06-01
- Poll: Analyst Org. You Trust in Enterprise Software - Traditional & Social
- This is a poll that can start settling some issues that seem to be of interest to many. Some crowdsourcing is in order to find out in the world of technology, who are the analyst organizations or categories that you trust the most when it comes to a good, clean...
- Blog posts 2009-05-19
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- Microsoft has finally acknowledged what outside observers have realized for some time: Windows 7 is going to be ready this year, in time for the holiday shopping season. That's the official message from the opening of Tech-Ed 2009 in Los Angeles today: Microsoft Tech*Ed North America 2009 kicked off...
- Blog posts 2009-05-11
- Scitable brings peer-reviewed credibility to the Wikipedia age
- Regular readers will know that I'm actually a pretty big fan of Wikipedia. I think it has as much, if not more of a place in student research than actual encyclopedias did for us Gen-Xers when we were younger: it's a starting point and a great source of background...
- Blog posts 2009-05-03
- Books: Entering the Age of Glosses
- Here's the key to thinking about the future of writing, something straight out of the manuscript era: the humble gloss or "scholia," for those who prefer the Latin. They are the notes, in margins, footnotes at the bottom of a page (the standard starting around 1700) and later in the...
- Blog posts 2009-04-27
- The CIA's Collaboration Growth Curve & IBM's Lotusphere ecosystem
- One of the highlights of last June's Enterprise 2.0 conference was Don Burke and Sean Dennehy of the US Central Intelligence Agency CIA describing how their 'Intellipedia' wikis were transforming the agency into a more collaborative organization: that presentation is embedded above. Ten...
- Blog posts 2009-04-16
- The Twitter Fantasy
- It seems everywhere you turn these days there's an excitable story about Twitter, the microblogging tool that is a mystery to some people, a miracle to others, and a service some are noisily evangelizing in hope of self publicity. As Twitter scales up...
- Blog posts 2009-02-21
- Enterprise architect warns: don't let mashups go the 'Excel' route
- We all know what happened with Excel, the most popular user-generated application on the planet. Every organization has hundreds, or even thousands of copies floating around, with no control or coordination. Is this what is happening with mashups, user-generated applications that may start to rival Excel in out-of-control proliferation? ...
- Blog posts 2009-02-18
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