Skip to main content

Home/ CCK0809/ Group items tagged crowdsourcing

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Ed Webb

The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...t_the_wisdom_of_the_crowds.php

crowdsourcing connectivism opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Wikipedia isn't written and edited by the "crowd" at all. In fact, 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site's edits. Even Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, "a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers."
  • I think your headline is misleading and Vassilis Kostakos should read the book before poking holes. Surowiecki is very clear about the conditions necessary for a wise crowd to prevail and those conditions are: 1. Diversity of opinion 2. Independence 3. Decentralization 4. Aggregation If your crowd possesses those qualities then it is wise and then it will be better at making decisions under Surowiecki's paradigm. The crowds used in the research (and the crowd in general) doesn't possess those qualities and therefore is an unfit data set. We should be trying to create the ideal crowd before we can obtain superlative results and not try to get good results from any random crowd.
  • Limitations in predictions market are well documented (and include Muhammad's points above), and constrain their practical application to a well-defined number of situation. Crowdsourcing suffers from the same limitations, which is not a problem, as long as you limit its application correspondingly. The problem occur when you stretch it outside the required constraints and yet present the results as "scientific", i.e. as a good proxy for what the crowd thinks. That's what professor Vassilis Kostakos's theory ultimately comes down to (or should - I don't know, I haven't read his report). Apps like Digg or Amazon's review are not scientific applications of crowdsourcing, and thus their results should not be seen as precise representation of our collective thinking.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Wisdom of Crowds is a crypto-fascist idea; there is no objective truth, there are no facts, truth is what "the crowd" decides it is. You get these unhealthy echo chambers of "activists" setting the agenda. This article said it best, over three years ago: DIGITAL MAOISM The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier
  • What I'd like to see is non-fakeable metrics on ecommerce sites: return rates or reorder rates (as appropriate), for example. Or for apps, how many times users open the app per day/week or whatever.
  • the research is interesting if linked to ideas of unrepresentative or illiberal democracy, as posited by Fareed Zakaria that suggests small interest groups can hijack democratic systems.
anonymous

Google Moderator This I Believe about Learning - 0 views

moderator.appspot.com

eci831 eci831tools cck09 i3cs21 i3cs21tools google crowdsourcing tools

shared by anonymous on 18 Sep 09 - Cached
  • anonymous on 18 Sep 09
     
    Google Moderator Demonstration: Nine Beliefs about Learning Drawn from Stephanie Pace Marshall's The Power to Transform
Ed Webb

Danny Sullivan: Search Wars -- With Bing, Twitter and Facebook, There's More to Searchi... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ars----with-bing_b_292373.html

google search twitter facebook crowdsourcing

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Sep 09 - Cached
  • In fact, Google's not just a habit. It's a virtual best friend for many people. In the past, we depended on friends, family and professionals for advice. These days, we turn to search engines for a range of issues, from deeply personal questions to trivia answers. Google is the leading search engine. Like a best friend, Google always there for us, listening and offering help. Google challengers like Bing are the equivalent of someone you don't know walking up and saying they want to be your new best friend. Thanks, but I'm covered.
  • Well, lots of those tweets are actually searches. Many people tweet questions out to their friends, families and others they follow on Twitter. Plenty get back answers, quickly, and from trusted sources. Twitter's not just a new best friend. It's access to hundreds of best friends, for advice.
  • Outside of tweeting, there's also Twitter Search itself. Was that an earthquake? Is your cable down? Twitter can tell you answers to such "real time" events even faster than Google.
Ed Webb

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody - 1 views

www.shirky.com/...looking-for-the-mouse.html

technology web2.0 shirky Culture future Media sociology history connectiveknowledge crowdsourcing networks

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Sep 09 - Cached
  • television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.
  • The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.
  • The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.
  • media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
  • Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
1 - 4 of 4
Showing 20▼ items per page