A Compendium of Crowdsourcing Resources

Today I spent a good long time researching Crowdsourcing.  Over the last year that it's been a term d'arte many articles have been written and sites have been launched to capture some of the energy behind the masses.

What is crowdsourcing?  In short, it is being a globally networked Tom Sawyer getting throngs of neighborhood kids to paint your fence.  And I mean that in a good way. 

So, say you have something that needs to be done.  You could hire and train and insure and manage an army of people to do it, or you could give a big cloud of people a little bit of money each and let them do it with less personal pain.

Here is a list of links that give (more or less) a primer on Crowdsourcing theory to date:

• Mahalo.com: Human-powered Search

• Crowdsource your search for real. No derivative algorithms here!

• Bug Labs

• Build anything small, just add ideas! Crowdsourced manufacturing.

• Democratizing Innovation: The Shift of Innovation to Users

• An Interview with MIT's Eric von Hippel on crowdsourcing and the rise of democratized innovation.

• Google's Lunchtime Betting Game - New York Times

• Google people in a prediction market over lunch.

• Herding characteristics of Social Media

• An excellent post showing the "conversation" as a predictable herding-type behavior. Memes are byproducts of and seeds for herding behavior. Interesting to think about.

• Popular Ideas - Dell IdeaStorm

• Dell's crowdsourcing Feature Farm

• Buzz Game: Market

• Tracking the memetrackers. Crowdsourcing in an automated way, memetrackers do. Like Google as well.

• Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One - ReadWriteWeb

• Josh Catone's Mar 07 post on crowdsourcing theory and practice to that date. Excellent post, very complete.

• Businessweek: Crowdsourcing How To

• A much better offering from Businessweek on Crowdsourcing. How to tips include focus, filters, and understanding your market.

• Businessweek - Crowdsourcing: Consumers as Creators

• Businessweek's crowdsourcing article which seems to be written to not exceed a space quota. Not too exciting.

• Crowdsourcing & StockPhotos

• A Nov 2007 post discussing the ability of traditional markets and crowdsourced markets to live together harmoniously. This deals specifically with microstock sites and their impact or lack thereof on traditional stock imagery

• Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing

• The article that launched a buzzword, Wired's 2006 article on Crowdsourcing.

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, wisdom of the crowds, wired, mahalo, dell ideastorm

Photo by Flying Pete.

Comments

[Bill Tozier]

Not sure which if any of your links include references to Distributed Proofreaders, http://pgdp.net, but DP was the first production focused crowdsourcing effort, seven years ago. All volunteers, but unlike any other Open Source software or other community collaborative thing, focusing all their energies on the speed and accuracy of making "better" electronic versions of books.

Far as I know, all the others are simple work-accumulators or open-ended conversations about stuff.