I can’t decided whether the term ‘crowdsourcing‘ is utterly brilliant or vulgar – but no matter, the core ideas that underpin it are excellent – distribute small tasks (evaluation, processing, etc.) to a large group and aggregate the results.
A great introduction to a variance on this theme (group decisions trumping experts) is Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds , but this podcast talks to a couple of guys who are using not so much the wisdom, but the aggregated horsepower of crowds.
One of the guys on the podcast is using Amazon’s Mechanical Turks to transcribe podcasts , which is a great idea.
The other, which I thought was pure genius, is to distribute small tasks (like identifying keywords) as banner ads in blogs and websites.
Take a few seconds to perform the task in the page – the site owner earns a cent or two, and collective work is distributed back to the main site…(they do all sorts of secondary processing to evaluate effectiveness, avoid spam etc.)
Brilliant – I think the podcast lasts about 30 minutes…