I've found some more out about crowdsourcing, and I experienced it in person. It is an example of using the social Web in innovative ways. How did I learn the answer? Wikipedia.
Crowdsourcing means that a person or organization tries to get a solution to a problem by publicizing the question and asking the public for help. In the past, they would hire someone to do the job, fix the problem, find a solution. By crowdsourcing, this now usually takes place on the Internet, and sometimes includes large prizes for the answers. Netflix has an offer of $1,000,000 for a better movie rating system, Proctor & Gamble have thousands of scientists working out problems on a website Innocentive.com.
Brian Lehrer interviewed Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine, who has been writing a series of articles on the subject, and they have publicized a project first to count and report the cars and SUV's on your block. Since they started that, now they've issued a further challenge to compile the information on an interactive Google map.
At the Liberty Science Center's new communication exhibit, there are survey questions on computer touch screens asking about how the viewer gets his or her news, communicates with friends, etc. The history of the results are instantly updated and displayed in a visual graph.
The new communications exhibit will be great, right up library and information students alley, when they get all the bugs worked out. Some displays are still under construction. On the positive side, they let us in free precisely because of that fact.
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