Social media communication sites like Twitter generate a massive amount of traffic. Its 2.3 million users generate over 3 million “tweets” per day (figures are likely higher, it’s growing as you read this). Depending on which side of the coin you’re on, that’s either a very cool stat about how much collective information Twitter’s users are generating, or a harbinger for the tangled mess of information that these will create (which might limit its usefulness). This deluge of data across the Internet has driven knowledge markets which aim to match subject experts (or just savvy Googlers) with people seeking information.
The traditional knowledge markets like Yahoo! Answers do little active work in matching a question with a resident subject expert, instead relying on the community to keep an eye on the topics they’re best equipped to answer. A new social search service (still in beta) called Aardvark.im from the folks at The Mechanical Zoo aims to actively feed questions to self-proclaimed “subject authorities” who take it from there. As you pose and answer questions you build your “knowledge network”—a social network of your conversation participants. The question routing is done via Aardvark’s algorithm, which according to a VentureBeat article, will involve favouring “friends-of-friends” as the first-line recipients, but does the expert finding for you.
Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream is one of my favorite blogs. Earlier this week, Mr. Kelly wrote a post titled Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism, in which he seriously entertains the idea that the Internet (working as a distributed brain) with cloud-based software (roughly analogous to the mind) could develop into a self-aware, semi-autonomous superorganism.
Central to this development is an increased sense of autonomy from human interactions (such as self-repair, stabilizing feedback loops, and self-directed traffic management) and “smartness,” — something that already exists in an ever-increasing form in the computational clouds of Google and Amazon, which are constantly learning about how it is that we use language, and form an understanding about how collective human behavior can be used to anticipate the actions of an individual. Read More »
Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.
This week in the roundup:
Jeff DeChambeau discussed privacy and digital surveillance
Dan Herman introduced us to ‘vote swapping’ and identified how this Web 2.0 technology now has the potential to influence elections
Don Tapscott highlighted some new research findings in order address a common misconception about video games and gamers
Denis Hancock reviewed some of the pitfalls of the traditional crowdsourcing model and introduced us to Poptent
Media outlets are rolling in clichés about the current economic nastiness (”The U.S. Sneezes, The World Catches Cold”). Warren Buffett couldn’t help himself with his “toxic Kool-Aid” references and a most recent Charlie Rose interview likening the U.S. economy to a “patient lying on the floor”.
The shockwave is moving quickly: venture capital stalwarts Sequoia Capital have been instructing their portfolio companies to prepare for a “doomsday scenario”. Cutting fat, eliminating redundancy, and finding the cheapest darn way to do business is now the imperative of all those wide-eyed, once-well-funded start-ups.
My dad once gave me good advice which I didn’t take. “Son, doctors, dentists, lawyers and teachers are recession-proof. Work smart.” For the most part, it holds true (it seems some lawyers are having a hard time). But it seems like you don’t need to be bricks-and-mortar or an M.D. to stay “recession-resistant”. Like magic, outsourcing marketplaces have been going like gangbusters despite economic woes.
The more people who take pages from Sequoia’s warning to slim down to essential personnel and services find that outsourcing fits the bill nicely. It’s like having talent attached to a spigot—you can match the resource-flow to your cash-flow (and work-flow) on-demand. A Reuters article boasts that Elance (a popular outsourcing marketplace) has increased billings by 65% this year—driven by the need for smaller firms to have a flexible, highly-trained workforce.
If this downturn finds you sitting on the couch, reluctantly watching daytime TV, outsourcing marketplaces could be just ticket to get you off The Young and The Restless and back to the ranks of the gainfully employed.
As TechCrunch reported on Wednesday, an interesting new company has moved into beta launch mode - Poptent, a “crowdsourcing platform” for the creation of advertisements. Why I put crowdsourcing in quotes is that they are not targeting a totally open platform where anyone can participate (think: YouTube), but rather a community of “small put professional teams capable of producing TV quality ads.” In the words of Poptent (you can check our a video about them here):
Poptent is a vibrant community of filmmakers (and actors, comedians, grips, animators and more!) who are connecting to each other and to companies that want to pay them for their talents. Through our passions for advertising and commercials, we are exploring a new way of creating branded messages for the Internet age.
Poptent members can show off their work, build a portfolio, collaborate with other creators, leverage our deep set of features, and best of all make money doing what they love.
Poptent brands are seeking new ways to reach their consumers and create new audiences. They are finding exciting possibilities that save them both money and time while staying just ahead of the curve of competition. They are, in a word, trendsetters.
What I particularly like about this “modified crowdsourcing” model is that it deals with some of the inequities inherent in more traditional platforms - too much power being given to the buyers, at the expense of the sellers. In such models, companies post a request to a community (for little or no upfront cost) where pretty much anyone can work it, and then if they deem any of the projects worthy they can opt to pay for them. Among other problems, there’s a scale issue here - as more and more people join, you are less and less likely (as a creator) to be successful, and in turn one might expect the best creators to start shying away.
The HP Social Computing Lab has taken an interesting look at the dynamics of crowdsourcing in relation to content consumption. Noting that we are in the midst of an inversion from the traditional model where relatively few people produce content and the majority simply consume it, the authors seek to explore an apparent paradox - why growth in content provision continues to persist, given that the structure of crowdsourcing would predict a tragedy of the commons situation. More simply, given that we can all just sit back and free ride off of what everyone else is doing, why aren’t we all sitting back and taking the free ride?
In order to explore the problem, the authors look at a dataset of almost 10 million videos on YouTube, submitted by 579,471 people, as of April 30 2008. The key finding is that while one might look at a “digital commons” as a traditional public good, the individuals contributing to the digital commons may perceive their activity as a private good. In this mindset, they’re not necessarily getting money, but rather attention, which can essentially be looked at as a “currency” they are collecting. I would personally call this benefit reputation, as I believe it is the ability to build one’s reputation that is driving the majority of crowdsourcing activity, but it’s essentially the same point. Read More »
The Sunlight Foundation recently launched PublicMarkup.org–a site that provides a simple, blog-like interface for soliciting feedback on legislation being considered in Congress. The legislative issue of the day, of course, is the proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial sector and there appears to be an active community currently debating the Senator Dodd’s legislation online.
Having already launched a number of innovative projects that are increasing the transparency of the US government (including MapLight and Congresspedia) the Sunlight Foundation foundation believes it can help increase participation in the legislative process by providing a forum where all legislation proposals can be subject to open public review in real-time.
Some will argue that the legislative process in the US already invites input through a variety of channels. As our collaborator Beth Noveck notes in a forthcoming report for nGenera (not yet published, but watch this space):
Corporations participate through lobbyists and notice-and-comment rulemaking. NGOs funnel information to government through think tanks and their white papers and publications. Interest groups lobby and enlist their members to respond—usually with postcards and email—in rulemaking and legislative policymaking.
The problem is that the traditional “notice and comment” process tends to favor an entrenched machinery of lobbyists that represent well-connected and often deep-pocketed interests. How many ordinary citizens are even aware of the “notice and comment” periods and how many of those citizens will find the time and resoucres to make formal submissions? I’m guessing that the answer is very few.
So what is different about the more open and collaborative process that the Sunlight Foundation aspires to create with PublicMarkup.org?
One, it provides a neutral forum in which to debate policy issues. Two, by collecting legislation, summaries, resources and commentary in a single linkable location, it makes participation in the legislative process more accessible to citizens. Three, PublicMarkup.org could conceivably evolve into a more robust platform for wiki-drafting, complete with tools for collectively filtering, rating and analyzing evidence, discussion forums for deliberation, and a wiki for drafting recommendations. Finally, by establishing a granular division of tasks (e.g., adding links, tagging and rating content, posting comments in a forum, drafting and editing recommendations, etc.), a collaborative process helps ensure that citizens with a limited amount of time can still make meaningful contributions to the process.
It’s the group dynamics that ultimately set this new collaborative approach apart from the traditional processes for rulemaking. In a conventional rulemaking process, atomized and often competitive groups submit comments that they hope will influence the legislative outcome. There is no incentive to compromise and there is often no dialogue whatsoever among the interest groups. When the period for comments is closed, it’s then up to a small group of public officials to sort through the commentary and reach a decision.
With a collaborative process, some of the burden of collecting, sorting, analyzing and drafting shifts to the public, leaving public officials in a position to steer and referree the process. An opportunity space opens up for deliberation, reflection and perhaps even compromise among multiple stakeholders.
Here’s how Noveck put it in her forhcoming report:
In a collaborative government, public participation is not pro forma.Though the recommendations made by private citizens are not binding, they are taken as serious contributions to the decision-making process.At the same time, collaboration assumes that stakeholders are qualified to make useful contributions to the subject- or industry-specific work of the agency.As such, a government agency that solicits public feedback employs a system to evaluate the input of the self-selecting private citizen.Only it is not the government agency that initially evaluates public feedback.Initially, ratings and recommendations remain in the hands of private citizens.Their recommendations are vetted by groups ancillary to the government agency.These groups comprise the very individuals who have volunteered their expertise in the first place.This alleviates some of the burden that participation outside of organizational boundaries creates for government officials.
Will PublicMarkup.org attract a critical mass of participants? And, will members of the US Congress actually pay attention? It seems unlikley that the latter will happen this time, but if the site evolves into a vital hub for policy debates with a diverse group of participants, then politicians will ignore forums like PublicMarkup at their peril.
Portal is my favorite videogame, it came out just about a year ago. For the uninitiated, the game is built around a new gameplay mechanic: portals. In a twist on the standard First Person Shooter (FPS), instead of having a bang-bang gun, you have a portal gun. It shoots two things, a blue portal and an orange portal. The portals form on any flat surface and anything that goes in one instantly comes out the other. Here’s the trailer:
Valve, the company who developed Portal, has a long history of openness with their games. With their first game, Half-Life, Valve released a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allowed amateur game designers to build their own games on top of the existing engine. Counter-Strike, arguably the most popular FPS game ever, was the result of a fan-made project built on top of the Half-Life engine. Valve ended up hiring the team behind Counter-Strike, and eventually made a sequel. Read More »
Economic theory suggests that the workings of a market can become more efficient with the increase in available information. Essentially this means that a price differential between similar goods can not persist if all customers that have access to the good are aware of it.
Price comparison sites such as NexTag, BizRate, Shopzilla and Yahoo! Shopping already help users find the best deals by comparing retailers. However, most of these sites only include prices from online sources as opposed to physical stores. Some physical retailers have begun to put their inventory and price information online, however, comparison between them is usually cumbersome. (Not to mention the frequent inaccuracies)
Other forays into the physical world include Craigslist and eBay mashups which place real-estate, used cars and other goods on a map. These services are excellent in helping people locate things, but do little to make the markets for similar goods more efficient. Japan is one of the countries ahead of the curve. A shopper can use their mobile phone to scan QR codes on items like books and compare them to online retailers such as Amazon.
Perhaps the best example of sharing useful information on physical goods is GasBuddy.com, a website that compiles gas prices in the U.S and Canada. Volunteers text or go online to enter prices for gasoline and diesel at fuel stations in their area. The work of thousands of volunteers creates a price map that can be accessed online or though a mobile phone. Although this is unlikely to equalize gas prices across the country, local differences are less likely to persist. The maps also give analysts and regulators a better picture of the differentials across the country.
As the internet, and increasingly mobile technologies, allow people to compile information on various goods and services, the pricing power will slowly shift from sellers to buyers. Buyers in a given area essentially begin to act as one. This shift could have a profound effect on the retail industry.
While a combination of my job and a bit of intellectual curiosity leads me to devour a lot of content on the web, there is precisely one publication that I pay to have delivered to my house each week - The Economist. It’s always a special treat when one of their articles focuses on one of our regular research areas, which is just what happened last week with Following the Crowd. While much of the article covers some of the “unusual quarters” where crowdsourcing is popping up, the final few paragraphs focus on the perceived limitations and/or challenges.
I want to particularly focus on the last one, which is in relation to Cambrian House (CH). Following a brief discussion about why crowdsourcing and commerce “make uneasy bedfellows”, the article leads into the CH story with “And even those companies that do try to share the proceeds from commercial crowdsourcing are not safe.” Noting that the CH model of encouraging people to send in ideas for new software products, have the community evaluate them, and fund the winners sounded like a good idea, the article then mentions that the chief executive acknowledged that the business model failed.
Wired’s Threat Level has a story up about how researchers have created a facebook application that’s capable of delivering Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks using nothing more than a facebook application and its users. The application, Photo of the Day, is installed by users who want a daily photograph. When users load up the page/photo of the day, the application sends a server to a third-party server (the one being attacked) and requests a large file from it, usually a high resolution image. This high resolution image is silently downloaded to the user’s computer, and not displayed. The effect of this is that by simply using the application, users are draining bandwidth from some targetted server. If enough users are using the application in this way, the server could get overloaded with requests, and rendered inaccessible to the people who are actually trying to visit it. Read More »
One rainy day earlier this summer, nGenera’s Gov 2.0 Program Director, Dan Herman, locked three summer interns in a room (Ben and Jude, and I) and asked us to think about what life - and government - would be like ten years from now. One of the results was the following short story about a day in the life of a man named Donald, in the year 2018. Hope you enjoy.
7:00 AM. The alarm rang, and Donald pressed the confirm button to silence it. His bedroom monitor switched on and began playing his morning video feeds.
What’s the solution for the ever-increasing gas prices? No, you don’t have to stop driving. With the help of a Finnish Internet community, you can convert your used gasoline-powered car to run on electricity. The Finnish-language forum, eCars – Now!, is taking a chapter out of the open source book to create a community where people can collaborate to start a mass movement toward electric cars. They’re encouraging the conversion from gas-powered cars to run on electricity, with the first rollout due this year.
Their website is designed to provide a portal for buyers and sellers of suitable used cars and components, and mechanics who can make the conversion with an electric motor and lithium batteries. Users on the site share ideas on the message board and e-mail lists, with the best information being put into use by the nonprofit community.
The first conversion target of this community will actually be a Toyota Corolla which they say have a range of 93 miles and a top speed of 75 miles per hour. (As a Toyota Corolla owner, this news is exciting to me.) If this community can successfully convert full size gasoline-power cars to run on electricity, look for this trend to catch on in your area. I may even be one of the first to convert my car if this trend hits the USA.
The other day I found myself perusing the New York Times like I’m apt to do anytime I need a few minutes to de-focus and relax. The third most emailed article of the day, “If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone,” caught my eye. “Hmm,” I think to myself. “That sounds collaborative. I’ll check it out.” Low and behold, the article is about InnoCentive, an innovation intermediary that brings together external experts to solve companies’ R&D problems.
Innocentive, founded in 2001, has grown nearly 30 percent since September of last year from 115,000 members to 145,000. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams talk about InnoCentive in the Ideagoras chapter of Wikinomics, so it’s no surprise that it’s making waves. What interests me, though, is that this article was the third most emailed article of the day.And just to clarify, it’s the overall most popular, not the just science section. Imagine all of those people reading about ideagoras! Maybe I just get a little too excited to see Wikinomics in the mainstream media, and maybe I’m forgetting who reads the New York Times. But wikinomics is infectious, and I clearly have the bug.
More interestingly though, according to the NYT article, is that the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Sen. John McCain, has “proposed that the government offer $300 million to whoever invents a battery compact enough, powerful enough and cheap enough to replace fossil fuels.”Maybe he’s a little technologically-challenged, but at least it seems he’s ready to collaborate. If the government embraces McCain’s proposal, perhaps we will see a solution sought on yet2.com or Innocentive. Perhaps even you can be a part of that solution.
Joe Westhead sent me an interesting email awhile ago in relation to the ongoing MyFootballClub experiment (and has an intriguing post on the subject that I’ll come back to later). For those that may have forgotten, MyFootballClub became relatively famous as it sought out 50,000 fans to not only co-own a professional football (soccer in North America) team, but manage it through the “wisdom of crowds” principles. To quote one of the many articles on their plans (wikipedia has a great overview of their history):
The probable new owners will manage the club, voting online to choose match lineups and buying new players. To help run the team, the fans will be able to view all the matches online and, after the game, receive statistics on how each player has performed. They will also get weekly updates from the team’s head coach on how each player is doing during practice.
It sounded really good - and most commentators particularly focused on the ability to vote on line ups as a key driver of participation. This functionality went live recently, but was hardly a resounding success - less than 2,000 of the over 30,000 members voted on the line ups for some recent games, and the vast majority that did bother to vote elected to let the coach decide. This lack of involvement has led to several articles like this one, which sees it not only a hugely negative development, but as potentially foreshadowing the collapse of the entire experiment. But is it really that bad?
As popular as wikis have become, they aren’t yet in use across all mediums. Case in point: music. However, a company called Sonoma Wire Works appears to have solved this problem. Sonoma Wire Works has announced the launch of RiffWorks T4, an online music-collaboration application. With RiffWorks T4, musicians can record ideas, use drums and guitars, and add effects to quickly create songs. Most importantly, users do this online, and can easily collaborate with peers around the world — all for free! When finished, their tunes can be broadcast on RiffWorld.com.
Technology empowers users. Apple’s GarageBand, for instance, enabled just about anyone to make professional sounding music (provided a certain level of musicianship). A while ago, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails released his music as GarageBand files so that fans can remix them as they please (think open-source music). GarageBand has been popular since the source of the music is standardized, people can send it around and collaborate with friends — basically “playing tennis” with works in progress. However, the distribution of these edited files has effectively been limited to e-mailing music attachments back and forth. Very 1.0.
RiffWorks T4 solves this problem by making the music itself wiki based. It lets four people work on the music at once, but there’s no upper limit to the number of potential collaborators. It also synchronizes the piece across the computers of all of the contributors, and keeps a copy on the web that is always up to date and universally accessible. RiffWorks T4 has wikified music. Because of its centralized, collaborative nature, for the first time ever we can have crowd created music, I wonder what it will sound like.
It’s pretty humorous (and either slightly sad given what doesn’t happen despite the available tools or slightly scary to think that Steve Jobs may be planning a coup).
My favourites:
There would be a three hour wait to get the latest $5 bill. It would also feature a web 2.0 gradient.
Instead of a Social Security number, all newborns would receive a free MobileMe account.
The cabinet would add the Department for Ergonomic Design, including a new position called theSecretary of Feng Shui. The office would debate the merits of using Arial versus Helvetica on street signs. Additionally, the Lincoln Bedroom would be upgraded with a mini rock waterfall and tiny Bonsai trees.
Steve Jobs’ face would inexplicably appear next to Roosevelt’s on Mt. Rushmore.
“In God We Trust” would be changed to “Getting Things Done”.
I thought I’d take it one step further and theorize what would happen “if the United Nations were run by Google.”
The Chinese and Russians would withdraw their vetoes against sanctions on Zimbabwe after Googling “Mugabe” ….
The Kyoto Protocol would be restructured with targets for member nations tied to the number of servers each country possesses.
The Russians would attempt to buy Google with oil money.
The Security Council would fail to come to agreement on “Don’t be evil” and would instead adopt “Google first, Act later.”
*Authors’ note: The Promethean Institute is a libertarian public policy think tank based in Orange County, California. I am neither libertarian nor Californian and by virtue of being Canadian, less good looking but definitely more in-touch with my socialist side.
I’m going to come right out and say it: people can get a little obsessive sometimes. And premium cable movie network Showtime has wisely decided to harness the power of their shows’ loyal fans by allowing users to create the content of their shows’ sites.
Showtime launched the first “Fan Wikis” about a year ago, and has since added pages for each of its shows. Since that time, pages have grown from basic content such as user-created cast bios and episode guides to complete guides of, well, everything related to the show.
Tudors’ fans maintain wikis from everything from costume design to a complete list of Tudor executions. Weed’s fans meticulously study characters’ wardrobes and post where to buy the exact article of clothing online. And it’s not a rogue few participating, either. The L Word wiki boasts more than 7,000 members.
Participation is simple. All a fan must do is register with Wetpaint and then check out what tasks are listed on the wiki To-Do list.
I haven’t decided what I think is more genius: Showtime outsourcing website content development to volunteers, or enabling fans to create fan sites on the actual Showtime site, keeping precious traffic right where they want it.
Showtime’s Fan Wikis are powered by Wetpaint, which describes itself as a place where “you can create websites that mix all the best features of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks into a rich, user-generated community based around the whatever-it-is that rocks your socks off.” The company announced May 19 it had raised $25 million to “accelerate the company’s growth.” According to TechCrunch, Wetpaint has now raised more than $40 million in all. On Wednesday, Wetpaint announced that more than 1million free social Wetpaint pages had been created since July 2006.
I’d like to see how Ben Letalik would grade Showtime in his weekly Wikinomics report card. Fan wikis combined with The Tudor’s multi-platform campaign launch of Season 2 (Showtime aired the entire season premiere for free on more than 60 sites, including Netflix and MSN) are very good examples of openness and sharing.
I started watching The Tudors (and subscribed to Showtime) after watching the Season 2 premiere on Netflix for free. I fell for Showtime’s 2.0 marketing plan hook, line, and sinker. Will Showtime’s innovative strategies and social networking features help it get an edge on long-time enemy (and market leader) HBO?
Wikinomics readers are encouraged to register at Ameritocracy. The site deploys a lot of principles of Wikinomics. It allows users to vote on veracity of stories, quotes, etc. that appear on the Internet. Quotes are rated for both credibility and relevancy (see screen shot below). From the site:
The core features of Ameritocracy are adding statements (made by a person or organization) and assessing statements. For example, if you hear Jane Doe say something on tv that you find questionable, you can submit that statement to the site to see what the community has to say about it, or you can add your own assessment. Members can then rate Jane Doe’s statement for credibility and relevancy, add their own assessments, or post a comment.
From this, Jane Doe will develop a reputation based on the community ratings, and you and your sources will develop a positive reputation so long as no one identifies your submission as a misquote or deliberately inaccurate information. The goal is to get a few different perspectives for each statement, so anyone looking to know more about a statement can get a broader picture and make their own assessment.
A couple of weeks ago I put up a post about a company called crowdSPRING, a new player in the “crowdsourcing for creative products” space (who contacted us directly - keep those “wikinomics in action” stories coming!). Co-founders Ross Kimbarovsky and Mike Samson were kind enough to sit down for an interview with me a couple of days later, and they provided a lot of information that I thought would be of interest to wikinomics readers – it’s a very interesting company with some well thought out ideas and plans.
Below is a summary of some of the highlights of the interview (note that I’ve reduced the questions that I asked down to their key points, moved a lot of stuff around, and left out quite a few just to manage the length of the post a bit – this is not a transcript. I have not altered the responses from Ross and Mike, and I have checked with them to ensure that what I’m presenting here is an accurate representation of the conversation).
It is worth noting that, at the time the interview took place, the company had been live for about two weeks. We look forward to following up in the coming months to report on their progress, particularly in relation to the collaborative aspects of the platform and how reputation profiles are coming into play – a particular area of interest that will likely be the topic of a future post.
Wikinomics and Risk Management The economic "risk bubble" has broken, and it's going to take significant changes to restore long-term confidence in the financial services market. In Risk Management 2.0: Overcoming the Current Financial Crisis and Restoring Stability and Prosperity with a New Perspective on Risk, Bob Tapscott and I outline how this industry needs to be redesigned to [...]
