Wetpaint is a website for user-created wikis. You can search the site on a certain subject and if you find an existing wiki on that subject you can join it. Otherwise you can create your own. The CEO of Wetpaint, Ben Elowitz, was interviewed at Assignment Zero where he talked about Wetpaint as well as crowdsourcing in general. One of the more interesting parts of the interview dealt with the concept of “the wisdom of crowds”:
Q: Do you really think there’s wisdom in crowds? If so, what’s the clearest example you know of? What projects in particular are you impressed by?
A: I’m a big fan of “The Wisdom of Crowds.” I think some of the best examples of the Wisdom of Crowds in action were provided by James Surowiecki in his book. Having been a city dweller for much of my life, I was particularly fascinated by his example of how walking down a busy sidewalk was a picture perfect example of how we navigate together to help each other get where we’re going as quickly as possible. Other examples I find fascinating – I think you need look only to the capital markets to find the best example of where collective knowledge quickly and constantly comes together to create markets for stocks and bonds. From a Wetpaint perspective, my favorite crowdsourcing project is the CSI wiki where fans of the show have built the definitive guide to the series. The amount of creativity and detail that has been quickly assembled could not have happened were it not for the collective efforts of the show’s fan base.
I haven’t read Surowiecki’s book yet but I would like to. At another point in the interview, Ben Elowitz talks about why people contribute for free:
Q: Is there money to be made with crowdsourcing? If so, why will some people work for free so that others can profit?
A:No question – there is money to be made with crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a basic human attribute – by nature we like to work together to produce things of value. This type of behavior has happened offline for millenniums and now it’s taking shape online. The business opportunity comes when entrepreneurs make the human process of collaboration quicker, easier and more rewarding than before.
In terms of why people work for free so others can profit, we have to remember that the value equation on crowdsourcing is not only measured in dollars and cents. As long as the participant feels like they are getting compensation commensurate with their input, the incentive to continue participating is rather high.
I think he missed the chance to elaborate on this. I agree that the value equation isn’t only measured in money. The research project I am currently running with my colleagues at Baruch College looks at exactly that question. If there are no external motivating factors (such as money) then there must be internal or intrinsic motivating factors. These can be reputation, efficacy (the ability to make an impact), attachment to the online community, and so on.
We are in the process of analyzing data we collected from users of participatory websites that should give us an idea on exactly what those motivating factors are. Stay tuned.
Today, I discovered Twittervision and Flickrvision. Neither is a technology that enhances my productivity (quite the opposite), or makes me more efficient, or gives me more flexibility at work. Both are simple but hypnotic mashups of Google maps with Twitter and Flickr respectively. Go to Twittervision and watch in almost-real-time on a map of the world as people send short text message (SMS) updates to Twitter on anything they are doing or thinking about at the time. Go to Flickrvision and watch in almost-real-time on a map of the world as people post their photographs.
They are fascinating sites that may not change the world in time-saving, efficiency-boosting, information-processing ways but they might change the world in a kinder we-are-all-the same-after-all kind of way.
StartUp2.0 is a competition of European web 2.0 startups. Tomorrow, May 10th, they will be voting on a list of the top 15 web 2.0 startups. You can see the list at Read/WriteWeb (which is in itself a very interesting blog).
The list of startups is not much different than those here in the U.S. (there’s lots of social networking and video in what they do) except for one difference. There seems to be more focus on geolocated services. This is partly because mobile providers in Europe have been providing excellent location-based services for a while whereas here in the US it’s still trying to get off the ground. And that’s despite the fact that GPS is a system created and owned by the US Department of Defense.
A user revolt has just happened at Digg (you can read about it at Techcrunch, BoingBoing, the NY Times, and TextYT). Digg, for those who don’t know, is a social content site where users can post links to articles and websites and other users can comment on them and vote them up (digg them) or down (bury them). Stories with most diggs float up to the top of the list and the front page of Digg.
After someone posted the decryption key for HD DVDs, Digg got a request threat from the company that owns the rights to HD DVD to take the article down. Digg caved in and did that.
Well, the Digg community was furious. Soon, the entire front page of Digg was full of stories and article posted by users with the same decryption key. Digg kept taking them down and suspending users. But eventually, the mob won. Digg co-founder Kevin Rose posted the following:
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…
In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
This is fascinating stuff. This isn’t just collective intelligence at work. This is collective activism at work and it seems to have worked. Of course, some might wonder what would happen when the mob is wrong or has the wrong intentions. Some might say that this was the case here, where intellectual property rights were being challenged.
I’m not going to try to judge this is good or bad. I am just going to point out how powerful this can be.
In a lot of science fiction writing, a classic nightmare scenario is that where networked artificial intelligence built by humans becomes so powerful that it takes over the world. Maybe the scifi writers got it wrong. Maybe what we should really be worried about is networked human intelligence (or lack thereof), or the power of the online mob. Unless of course, you are like me, and you believe that humanity as a whole can be good and smart and can have the right intentions, and that it’s only a minority of people who are evil and it’s when they get a lot of power that all hell breaks loose.
If you feel as lost as I sometimes do in the sea of tiny Web 2.0 companies that seem to provide more and more specialized services, this is the site for you. Go2Web2.0 is a fantastic directory of Web 2.0 companies with a cool interface that allows you to visually scan dozens of companies and search them by tags. It is in itself an example of Web 2.0 technology, using Ajax and tagging very effectively.
Check it out. There are some great examples of innovation and ingenuity in there. Plus a lot of sites that are truly useful.
I often talk to my students about the power of today’s networked information environment in shaping reputation. Keeping secrets has become extremely difficult, for businesses, politicians, and even 15-year-olds. All you need is one person (often yourself) to put the information in digital format and post it somewhere where others can read it. The network effect can be frightening. In a matter of minutes, it can become world-wide news. And even if you take the information down, it will always exist, cached on servers everywhere just waiting to be found. The result can be tremendous pressure on companies and politicians to clean up their act and be accountable. And I’ve always told my students, some of whom are budding CEOs and CIOs themselves, that the way to control your reputation is not by controlling information that is made public, but by making more information public yourself.
Well, enter Wiredmagazine, which has done a fantastic job in reporting on this idea and giving it a cool name: radical transparency. It has several articles on the subject but this one in particular tells the story beautifully. In fact, the whole article was written in the author’s blog inviting reader feedback, some of which is featured in the printed article. As the article’s author, Clive Thompson, says:
The Internet has inverted the social physics of information. Companies used to assume that details about their internal workings were valuable precisely because they were secret. If you were cagey about your plans, you had the upper hand; if you kept your next big idea to yourself, people couldn’t steal it. Now, billion- dollar ideas come to CEOs who give them away; corporations that publicize their failings grow stronger. Power comes not from your Rolodex but from how many bloggers link to you – and everyone trembles before search engine rankings.
Some of you may be thinking: What about industrial secrets? The secret recipe of Coke? As Clive points out:
[Some of my blog readers] enjoyed ripping apart my new theories. Several pointed out that secrecy can be necessary – CEOs are often required by law to keep mum, and many creative endeavors benefit from being closed: Steve Jobs came up with a terrific iPhone precisely because he acts like an artist and doesn’t consult everyone. In fact, secrecy is sometimes part of the fun. Who wants to know how this season of 24 is going to end? It’s not secrets that are dying, as one reader named gjudd noted, but lies.
Secrets can be useful tools for competitive advantage. Even though there are many cases when even those secrets are better left in the open. Just look at the success of all the open-source software out there.
So it’s not secrets that are dying. It’s spin control that’s dying. This spells trouble for PR firms.
What’s making me even more excited is the impact this is already starting to have on politics, where transparency is a dirty word and spin control is god. Remember George Allen’s “macaca” comment that got posted on YouTube and cost him a Senate seat?
I just found this today. I will definitely be using it next time I am teaching me e-business class, right before (or after) I discuss HTML, XML, and the Web 2.0 environment.
Posted by technodarwinism 
Posted by technodarwinism 
Posted by technodarwinism 
