Toluu : Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing

The coverage of the Mumbai attacks offered the bizarre and increasingly frequent spectacle: the news media reporting on its inadequacy. Within minutes of the first attacks, on-the-scene reports started appearing on Twitter, Flickr and citizen-media sites like NowPublic.com. Unencumbered by expensive cameras, skeptical editors or professional ethics, citizen journalists filled the breech during the early hours of the crisis, "while there was a vacuum of official information from government sources or from mainstream media outlets still struggling to understand the extent of the attacks," according to a somewhat breathless New York Times piece yesterday.

How fast was the crowd? I was in the office on Wednesday afternoon, sifting through a mountain of paperwork and generally ignoring my news feeds. "Jesus," exclaimed Noah Shachtman, from his cubicle here at Wired's New York offices. "Terrorist attacks in Mumbai." Less than an hour later Noah published this post to Wired's Danger Room blog, noting that dozens of videos (there are now hundreds) had been uploaded to YouTube, a

If I Were an Editor and You Were All Reporters ...November 26

As I get ready to leave for the long weekend, I wanted to get a post up with a little bit of staying power. So I thought I'd engage in a little thought experiment. I'm going to pretend I run a good-sized news desk (we'll call it the crowdsourcing bureau) and I actually have a team of writers I can send out on assignment. A lot of press releases, personal appeals, business proposals and the like come across my transom. Some are intriguing. Many are bone-headed, or bear the unmistakable scent of snake oil. I've selected several of the former and have written up what are generally called "assignment memos" in the industry.

Now my suspicion is that my little parlor game will start and end with this post. But if any of you feel inspired, go ahead and take any of the following assignments. I promise to post any reasonably well-written and well-reasoned post that results.

Story: The USAID Development 2.0 Challenge
Backgrounder: The United States Agency for International Development isn't known for innovation. But it's recently launched an initiative to generate ideas on how mobile applications could be used to "improve development impact and connect people in developing countries to key resources in health, banking, education, agricultural trade, or other pressing development issues." Three winners will be chosen. Grand prize is 10 grand. The runners up get $5,000. All three will

Google Launches SearchWikiNovember 21

Last night Google officially launched its SearchWiki function. Now you can customize your own search results—upgrading the best, deleting the worst and adding notes to any you like. It is, in characteristic Google fashion, straightforward and ridiculously easy to use. It is also—for a company that tends to follow the release early and often dictum by quietly adding upgrades and features with little fanfare—an uncharacteristic hard launch. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb notes, "We expect this to be a very big deal. ... This isn't Google Labs, this isn't a little project off to the side, apparently there's a Google Search Wiki team and they have access to the primary search results page."

So what's wiki about it? While your changes only affect your own searches, you can also view everyone else's edits by clicking on the "See all notes for this SearchWiki" link at the bottom of any search page. This could become a real acid test for crowdsourcing. Since its release today, SearchWiki has already generated—shocking, this—much commentary in the search results for "Obama." This contains such gems as "Hi there!!!" and "Obamanation!" Google has written Digg style voting function into the comments, so we can hope that in time the more inane commentary gets voted out of view. But if I learned anything in the research for my book, it was that bigger crowds invariably lead to exponential increases in idiocy. SearchWiki could revolutionize search, or it could just attract a global army of trolls. Time will tell. While we wait, here are some first-blush reactions from across the Intertubes:

• Michael Arrington asks: If it ain't broke, why fix it?
• Official Google Blog on the release
• John Battelle wonders whether people want customized results.
• and VentureBeat says SearchWiki proves that despite its size Google retains the ability to reinvent itself.

Finally, here's the official Google video explainer:

Crowdsourcing the Patent Review SystemNovember 20

There are many areas of government over which Obama has pledged to wave the magic wand of reform. And given the severity of the current economic crisis, fixing the system by which the US awards patents and trademarks has presumably been placed on the back burner. If that's the case, it's a shame, because the patent system's problems have reached tragi-comic proportions. As of early 2008 (when I last researched the matter for my book) it took an average of 2.5 years for an application to work its way through the USPTO, which has a backlog of more than 1 million applications. The 5,500 examiners themselves are notoriously underpaid and overworked, and can only allot twenty hours to review even the most abstruse patents. Further hampering the process, reviewers rarely posses expertise in computer science and aren't allowed to consult the Internet in their research, relying instead on the USPTO's own database of prior art. The result? An increase in undeserving patents and a Gordian Knot of conflicting claims. Unsurprsingly, patent litigation has doubled since 1990, at an average cost of $2 million per lawsuit.

In my book I chronicled how Beth Noveck, a professor at New York Law School, was trying to harness the network—which is to say, all of us—to improve the process. She launched Peer-to-

A Personal Note: A Boy Named FinnNovember 12

I've dithered for weeks over whether to write this post. As my longtime readers know, I've maintained a strict formula for what makes it onto this blog: I don't discuss my other Wired stories, or the news of the day, or how I feel about the state of the nation. Above all, I've conscientiously kept my personal life off these pages, for the excellent, time-honored reason that stories are almost invariably more interesting than the personalities who report on them. The crowdsourcing blog is devoted, simply, to crowdsourcing, in all its various manifestations and implications.

Today I'm going to break with tradition, for two reasons: First, I believe in transparency; Second, believing in crowdsourcing as I do, I think it has applications in my own life, which is another way of saying I have faith in communities of people I've never met. I'll make the relevance of these principles clear in what follows.

My son Finn, born in September of last year, has significant developmental delays. While we don't know the specific cause for the delays, he lags well behind his peers on all fronts: His social, verbal and motor skills are all impaired. He was first diagnosed in February, when he was four months old. At that point we enrolled him in an early intervention program, which sends physical, speech and occupational therapists into our home twice a week. We also began the rounds of doctor visits. Delays impact every aspect of a child's development, so we had to t