Takuya Homma's Bookmarks tagged crowdsourcing →  View Popular

Web of Fate is a social experiment that harnesses the collective intelligence of the web to visualize and uncover hidden relationships among future and historical events.

[M]y sense is that registered users will be quite pleased with what they’re offered. Given enough members, this place could become a real hotbed for forecasters.

Earlier projects in distributed computing, such as SETI@home, which searched for extraterrestrial life, have used the power of millions of home computers. But more recently, scientists have begun to realise that distributed human brain power itself can be a useful commodity, as in working out the shape of proteins. Dr Szalay says that the voorwerp episode has shown how immensely valuable the public can be.

The next step is to ask people to do more complicated things, such as keeping an eye out for weird objects, which is bound to appeal to armchair astronomers. Hanny’s object had been there for decades, unnoticed in the astronomical archives. The idea now is for the public to explore strange new galaxies; to seek out new voorwerps and to boldly go where no amateur has gone before.

Law enforcement agencies were quick to adopt crowdsourcing. In the fall of 2006 Texas set up the "Virtual Neighborhood Border Watch Program; One detective employed crowdsourcing (and playing cards!) to crack cold cases; and late last year the FBI announced a plan to turn 150 digital billboards into massive wanted posters. It's a natural fit, and hardly unprecedented. Think of that standby of old Westerns, the posse or—more ominously—the Stasi's persuading one half of the East German populace to spy on the other half. Crowdsourcing Uber Alles!

Which brings us to our first link of the day: UCrime, which takes campus crime data and maps it using a GoogleMap API, representing each category of crime with a cute little icon (did anyone ever really put money in a bag with a dollar sign on it?) Sound familiar? That's because Adrian Holovaty got hella props when he did the same thing with a far larger data set, creating the seminal ChicagoCrime.org (since folded into Holovaty's hyper-local journalism company, EveryBlock). Ever since programmers and journalists alike have gone dotty over data-feeds.

FortiusOne makes "the World’s geographic data accessible to everyone for
learning, decision making and problem solving." (I think this means they collect GIS and release it in the wild, a la open source, though if anyone from the company is reading this, feel free to correct me in the comments). Open source GIS has an extensive history, and I've long predicted that crowdsourcing map data will eventually be adopted by all Geo-data providers. That's quickly becoming the case, as a new initiative from GPS data giant TomTom makes clear.

Google isn't rejecting the wisdom of the crowd. Once an author
creates a knol, the general public can improve it. People can suggest
corrections, edits and amendments to the content -- a technique Google
calls "a moderated edit."

Readers can also leave comments alongside the content. While the
author is the arbiter of the item itself, and can reject suggestions,
he or she can't delete the comments. Users can also rate knols on a
five-star scale.

Further complicating the Google vs. Wikipedia storyline is the fact that Wikipedia itself has quietly but persistently been instituting checks and balances on the crowd's contributions. In fact, Wikipedian-in-Chief Jimmy Wales just announced an approval system for edits at the Wikimania conference last week.  We could even be seeing the emergence of some sort of consensus among the powers behind Knol, Wikipedia, Citizendium and now, even, Encyclopedia Britannica. Levy:

But can any reader know if an article, author or news source is credible?

We agree that not everyone can know if every article is credible or not. We don't expect that. However, we truly believe that if enough members of our community take the time to participate and vote, we can get it right.