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?
- Interesting....I don't see a reason Wikipedia would max out considering that every day new younger participants are entering the field. It's timeless relevance could diminish as new and younger editors focus on more up-to-date matters as Twitter, Sexting and Cloud computing, and less on the Roman Empire, the Great Depression...
- Discussion threads 2009-11-23
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- Blog posts 2009-09-09
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- Discussion threads 2009-09-06
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- 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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- Blog posts 2009-08-06
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- Discussion threads 2009-06-23
- A Twitter driven social experiment
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- Blog posts 2009-06-01
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- 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
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- 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...
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