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Tags > crowdsourcing
The ethics of the fail - Ben Huh on the responsibilities attached to other people's failures.
December 20, 2011
The content you see on Cheezburger, Inc.'s Fail Blog often mixes humor and pain — but not always in equal proportions. Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh discusses the boundaries of a fail.
Four short links: 15 November 2011 - Internet Asthma Care, C Fulltext, Citizen Science, and Mozilla
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 15, 2011
Cost-Effectiveness of Internet-Based Self-Management Compared with Usual Care in Asthma (PLoSone) -- Internet-based self-management of asthma can be as effective as current asthma care and costs are similar. Apache Lucy -- full-text search engine library written in C and targeted at dynamic languages. It is a "loose C" port of Apache Lucene™, a search engine library for Java. The...
FLOSS Manuals books published after three-day sprint
By Andy OramOctober 21, 2011
Joining the pilgrimage that all institutions are making toward wider data use, FLOSS Manuals is exposing more and more of the writing process.
Wrap-up from FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google
By Andy OramOctober 21, 2011
Mixtures of grassroots content generation and unique expertise have existed, and more models will be found. Understanding the points of commonality between the systems will help us develop such models.
Day one of FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google Summer of Code summit
By Andy OramOctober 19, 2011
Four teams at Google launched into endeavors that will lead, less than 72 hours from now, to complete books on four open source projects.
FLOSS Manuals sprint starts at Google Summer of Code summit
By Andy OramOctober 18, 2011
Four free software projects have each sent three to five volunteers to write books about the projects this week. Along the way we'll all learn about the group writing process and the particular use of book sprints to make documentation for free software.
From crowdsourcing to crime-sourcing: The rise of distributed criminality - How criminals are applying crowdsourcing techniques.
September 29, 2011
Crowdsourcing began as a way to tap the wisdom of crowds for the betterment of business and science. Crime groups have now repurposed the same tools and techniques for their own variation: "crime-sourcing."
Strata Week: Crowdsourcing and gaming spur a scientific breakthrough - Fold.it users make a scientific breakthrough, Twitter open sources real-time processing tool, Google faces a senate hearing.
September 22, 2011
In this week's data news: Fold.it gamers help with HIV research, Twitter eyes data analytics, and Google testifies before the Senate.
Strata Week: MapReduce gets its arms around a million songs - MapReduce crunches a million-song dataset, GPS and accident reconstruction, and WWI crowdsourcing.
September 8, 2011
This week's data stories include a guide to using MapReduce to process the Million Song Dataset, a story about how GPS data can help reconstruct lost memories (and accidents), and evidence that emergency crowdsourcing goes back further than many realize.
Strata Week: What happens when 200,000 hard drives work together? - IBM is building a massive 120-petabyte array and Infochimps releases a unified geo schema.
September 1, 2011
IBM takes data storage to a whole new level (120 petabytes, to be exact), Infochimps' new API tries to make life easier for geo developers, and the "Internet of people" keeps an eye on Hurricane Irene.
Dominant form of journalism foretold by Reynolds Journalism Institute - Why a new proposal for making the news business sustainable deserves attention.
August 15, 2011
A new paper from the Reynolds Journalism Institute deserves a look from anyone interested in publishing, social networking, or democratic discourse.
Four short links: 15 August 2011 - Illusions, Crowdsourcing, Translations, and Favourite Numbers
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 15, 2011
Illusion Contest -- every year they run an open contest for optical illusions. Every year new perceptual illusions are discovered, exploiting hitherto unresearched areas of our brain's functioning. Citizen Science Alliance -- the team behind GalaxyZoo, who help other researchers in need of crowdsourcing support. Ancient Lives -- crowdsourced translation and reconstruction of ancient papyri from Oxyrhyncus, already found...
Four short links: 29 July 2011 - SQL Injection, Optical Stick, SQL for Crowdsourcing, and DIY Medical Records
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 29, 2011
SQL Injection Pocket Reference (Google Docs) -- just what it sounds like. (via ModSecurity SQL Injection Challenge: Lessons Learned) isostick: The Optical Drive in a Stick (KickStarter) -- clever! A USB memory stick with drivers that emulate optical drives so you can boot off .iso files you've put on the memory stick. (via Extreme Tech) CrowdDB: Answering Queries with...
Four short links: 5 July 2011 - Organising Conferences, Moving to the JVM, Language Crowdsourcing, and Bayesian Computing
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 5, 2011
Conference Organisers Handbook -- accurate guide to running a two-day 300-person conference. Compare Yet Another Perl Conference guidelines. Twitter Shifting More Code to JVM -- interesting how, at scale, there are some tools and techniques of the scorned Enterprise that the web cool kids must turn to. Some. Business Process Workflow XML Schemas will never find love. Louis von...
Four short links: 29 June 2011 - Crowdsourced Economics, Education Gold, Meme Analytics, Hacktivism
By Nat TorkingtonJune 29, 2011
Billion Prices Project -- rather than wait for official inflation figures, the BPP from MIT scans online retailer prices from around the planet. (via The Economist) Readings in Education -- Dan Meyer has linked to some of the best papers he's been reading at grad school. If you have opinions about education, or are thinking of doing something to...
Four short links: 24 June 2011 - Eliza Aftermath, Open Textbook, Crowdsourcing Music Fingerprinting, Singularity Skepticism
By Nat TorkingtonJune 24, 2011
Eliza pt 3 -- delightful recapitulation of the reaction to Eliza and Weizenbaum's reaction to that reaction, including his despair over the students he taught at MIT. Weizenbaum wrote therein of his students at MIT, which was of course all about science and technology. He said that they "have already rejected all ways but the scientific to come to...
Four short links: 20 June 2011 - Recording Glasses, Food Hacks, Visualizing Documents, Human Computation
By Nat TorkingtonJune 20, 2011
HD Video Recording Glasses (Kickstarter) -- as Bryce says, "wearable computing is on the rise. As the price for enabling components drops, always on connectivity in our pockets and purses increases, and access to low cost manufacturing resources and know-how rises we’ll see innovation continue to push into these most personal forms of computing." (via Bryce Roberts) Sketching in...
Four short links: 10 June 2011 - CS Courses, Crowdsourced Sound Map, CSS Game, and Shared Social Intentions
By Nat TorkingtonJune 10, 2011
Advanced Computer Science Courses -- collection of online course notes/lectures for classes in advanced CS topics. (via Hacker News) UK SoundMap -- very cool crowdsourced audio landscape of the UK. (via British Library) CSS Panic -- game with no HTML, no Javascript, it's all CSS. Only works in Safari and Chrome. (via Dale Harvey) Sharing Intentions Talk -- interesting...
Open Question: Would you fund your favorite author? - A new service lets authors pitch ideas and collect funding from readers. Would you donate?
June 2, 2011
With the launch of the Unbound.co.uk publishing platform, readers can fund the books they want to read — and the startup launched with some pretty big-name authors. Would you fund the next book from your favorite author?
Four short links: 30 May 2011 - Tables to Charts, Crowdsourcing Incentives, Domain Boondoggles, and Conquering Complexity
By Nat TorkingtonMay 30, 2011
Chartify -- jQuery plugin to create Google charts from HTML tables. (via Rasmus Sellberg) Designing Incentives for Crowdsourcing Workers (Crowdflower) -- In a tough turn for the sociologists and psychologists, none of the purely social/psychological treatments had any significant effects at all. The gTLD Boondoggle -- ICANN promised back in 1998 that they would bring the world lots of...
Improving the landscape for organic startups - A congressional committee will hear a "crowdfunding exemption" proposal next week.
By Paul SpinradMay 6, 2011
Next week, Sherwood Neiss will testify in favor of a small offerings exemption for investments, which could spark a revolution in grassroots entrepreneurship.
Four short links: 29 April 2011 - Gamification's Failures, Crowdsourced Clinical Study, Traceability, and Faster Web
By Nat TorkingtonApril 29, 2011
Kathy Sierra Nails Gamification -- I rarely link to things on O'Reilly sites, and have never before linked to something on Radar, but the comments here from Kathy Sierra are fantastic. She nails what makes me queasy about shallow gamification behaviours: replacing innate rewards with artificial ones papers over shitty products/experiences instead of fixing them, and don't get people...
Four short links: 27 April 2011 - Ignorance, Crowdsourcing, Click Fraud, and Trolls
By Nat TorkingtonApril 27, 2011
Aaargh! Physicists! --the dangers of venturing outside your area of expertise is that someone will mercilessly point out your overconfident missteps, as happens here. Unless, of course, your new field is social media, in which case there are hundreds of thousands of sycophantic circlejerkers ready to retweet, link back, and Like your misbegotten ill-conceived content-free mindless dribblings. Crowdsourcing to...
Data News: Week in Review - Tracking data found in iOS 4, crowdsourcing is questioned, and the Senate doesn't get "open data"
April 21, 2011
In the latest Data News: The tracking data saved in a hidden iOS 4 file causes a stir, the value of crowdsourcing during crisis response is questioned, and the Senate finally releases its financial data ... in PDF.
Four short links: 20 April 2011 - PDP-11 Emulated, Crowdsourcing Culture, Deep Knowing, and Scientific Method
By Nat TorkingtonApril 20, 2011
PDP-11 Emulator in Javascript, Running V6 UNIX -- blast from the past, and quite a readable emulator (heads up: cd was chdir back then). See also the 1st edition UNIX source on github. (via Hacker News) 2010: The Year of Crowdsourcing Transcription -- hasn't finished yet, as NY Public Library shows. Cultural institutions are huge data sets that need...
Citizensourcing smarter government in New York City - Deputy mayor Steven Goldsmith on crowdsourcing and data.
March 8, 2011
In this interview, New York City deputy mayor Steven Goldsmith talks about how the Big Apple is opening government data and creating new relationships with citizens and civic developers.
Four short links: 8 March 2011 - Open Source at Facebook, Mobile Patterns, Data Vis, and Open vs Crowd Sourcing
By Nat TorkingtonMarch 8, 2011
Facebook and Open Source -- David Recordon interview. HipHop really embodies how we create at Facebook. It started as a hackathon project by Haiping Zhao, who was later joined by Iain Proctor and Minghui Yang. Haiping noticed a number of similarities between the syntax of PHP and C++, and wondered if you could programmatically rewrite one into another. Two-and-half...
Software patents, prior art, and revelations of the Peer to Patent review
By Andy OramMarch 2, 2011
Besides the greater openness that Peer to Patent promotes in evaluating individual patent applications, it is creating a new transparency and understanding of the functioning of the patent system as a whole. Problems with prior art disproportionately affect software.
Media old and new are mobilized for effective causes - Sasha Costanza-Chock on why old and new media will continue to co-exist.
By Andy OramMarch 2, 2011
Sasha Costanza-Chock explains why both conventional media and social networks are critical resources, and why social causes have just as much trouble as corporations using the latter effectively.
An era in which to curate skills: report from Tools of Change conference
By Andy OramFebruary 18, 2011
Three days of intensive discussion about the current state of publishing wrapped up last night in New York City. Research and sales, authoring and curation, are all still important skills.
An era in which to curate skills: report from Tools of Change conference
By Andy OramFebruary 18, 2011
Three days of intensive discussion about the current state of publishing wrapped up last night in New York City. Research and sales, authoring and curation, are all still important skills.
An era in which to curate skills: report from Tools of Change conference
By Andy OramFebruary 17, 2011
Three days of intensive discussion about the current state of publishing wrapped up last night in New York City. Research and sales, authoring and curation, are all still important skills.
Four short links: 20 December 2010 - Intrusion Recovery, MTurk Spam, Open Source, and Google Pottymouth
By Nat TorkingtonDecember 20, 2010
Gawker Tech Team Didn't Adequately Secure Our Platform -- internal memo from CTO to staff after the break-in. Notable for two things: the preventative steps, which include things like two-factor authentication and not collecting commenter details; and the lack of defensiveness. When your executives taunt 4chan and your systems get pwned as a result, it must be mighty hard...
Strata Gems: Let it snow - Simple crowdsourcing paints a Twitter map of UK snow
By Edd DumbillDecember 11, 2010
Snow in the UK is generally a source of delight. A simple idea to use Twitter as a way of gathering snow reports from around the country has proved remarkably popular.
Strata Gems: Usahidi enables crowdsourced journalism and intelligence - Built for emergencies, now available as open source and as a web service
By Edd DumbillDecember 10, 2010
Built for emergencies, Usahidi's mapping and social media monitoring tools also have commercial applications. Though open source, the tools are also available as for-pay hosted services.
Four short links: 2 December 2010 - University IP, Apollo 13, LinkedIn Open Source, Crowdsourced Satellite
By Nat TorkingtonDecember 2, 2010
Glasgow University to License Its IP For Free -- while a small proportion of high value University of Glasgow IP will still be made available to industry through traditional licensing and spin-out companies alone, offering the bulk of IP to a larger audience for free adds value to the UK economy. (via Hacker News) Apollo 13 Spacelog -- the...
Four short links: 1 December 2010 - Kinect Hacking, Crowdsource, Lists, and Tablets
By Nat TorkingtonDecember 1, 2010
2 Kinects 1 Box (YouTube) -- merging data from two Kinects in real time, to get astonishing 3D information. (via Chelfyn Baxter) Crowdsource is not Open Source (Simon Phipps) -- there are some businesses that don't understand this, and exploit community for their sole benefit in the name of open source. Ignorance of the four freedoms is dangerous. We...
Four short links: 30 November 2010 - Git Library, Uncocked Open Data, Role of Editorial, and Network Neutrality Salvo
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 30, 2010
libgit2 -- a linkable git library. Ruby and Python bindings. Open Data: How Not to Cock It Up -- Tom Steinberg lays it out. Algorithm and Crowd are Not Enough -- My point isn’t that Google, Netflix, Amazon, Yelp or any of the others are doomed. But I do think there’s an opportunity brewing for entrepreneurs, websites and companies...
Crowdsourcing specific microtasks
By Ben LoricaOctober 25, 2010
Since the first-ever Mechanical Turk meetup a year ago, there has been an explosion in crowdsourcing services and a well-attended conference in San Francisco. I remain enthusiastic about crowdsourcing, but the number of companies has me worried about quality of work. Fortunately specialization is already occurring, so for particular tasks there are companies out there ready to provide high-quality service....
Four short links: 12 October 2010 - Zen of Open Data, Accurate Judging, Disorienting Game, and Grokking HTTP
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 12, 2010
The Zen of Open Data (Chris McDowall) -- lovely short piece that encapsulates the whole business. The Calculus of Committee Composition (PlosONE) -- using accuracy of judges, cost of a wrong decision, and cost of judges to arrive at the correct number of judges for any given situation. (Breaking news: ice skating gets it wrong) This might be useful...
Channeling crowdsourcing into distributed work - How crowdsourcing affects government, research and the workforce.
By Alex HowardSeptember 17, 2010
In a brief Q&A, CrowdFlower founder Lukas Biewald looks at crowdsourcing's growing influence and its impact -- both positive and negative -- on the workforce.
Four short links: 7 September 2010 - Crowdsourced Climate Science, Underground Map of Science, Programming Clue, and Great Molbio Writing
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 7, 2010
GalaxyZoo for Climate Science? -- GalaxyZoo is the crowdsourced physics research. A group of climate scientists want the same, to help predict "weather events". See also the Guardian article. (via adw_tweets on Twitter) Crispian's Science Map -- gorgeous Underground-style map showing scientists and their contributions. (via arjenlentz on Twitter) Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier (Ted Dziuba) --...
Four short links: 30 August 2010 - H.264 Patents, Pakistan Flood Crowdsourcing, YouTube to MP3, Bloom Filter Tips
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 30, 2010
Free as in Smokescreen (Mike Shaver) -- H.264, one of the ways video can be delivered in HTML5, is covered by patents. This prevents Mozilla from shipping an H.264 player, which fragments web video. The MPEG LA group who manage the patents for H.264 did a great piece of PR bullshit, saying "this will be permanently royalty-free to consumers"....
Four short links: 23 August 2010 - Crowdsourced Architecture, Lego Timetracking, Streaming Charts, and The Deeper Meaning of School
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 23, 2010
Open Buildings -- crowdsourced database of information about buildings, for architecture geeks. A sign that crowdsourcing is digging deep into niches far far from the world of open source software. (via straup on Delicious) Lego-Based Time Tracking -- clever hack to build physical graphs of where your time goes. (via avgjanecrafter on Twitter) Smoothie Charts -- a charting Javascript...
Thousands of workers are standing by - CrowdFlower's Lukas Biewald on the repercussions of crowdsourced work and the state of human-machine relations.
August 18, 2010
The definition of work has changed dramatically in recently years. Where jobs used to be defined by place and time, now many types of work can be tackled by anyone, anywhere. Lukas Biewald, CEO of labor-on-demand company CrowdFlower and a speaker at next month's Web 2.0 Expo in New York, is at the center of the labor shift. He discusses the pros and cons of crowdsourced labor in the following Q&A.
Tracking the tech that will make government better - Crowdsourcing, fraud detection, and open data tools were touted at a recent Senate hearing.
By Alex HowardAugust 17, 2010
A hearing on innovative uses of technology in government examined stimulus spending transparency at Recovery.gov, fraud detection through open data analysis, and the potential of crowdsourcing.
Four short links: 6 August 2010 - Amazon Margins, Crowdsourced Science, Data Tool Opensourced, Document Splitting
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 6, 2010
AWS: Forget the Revenue, Did You See the Margins? (RedMonk) -- According to UBS, Amazon Web Services gross margins for the years 2006 through 2014 are 47%, 48%, 48%, 49%, 49%, 50%, 50.5%, 51%, 53%. (these are analyst projections, so take with grain of salt, but those are some sweet margins if they're even close to accurate) Science Pipes...
The art of community leadership
By Brian AhierJuly 18, 2010
I stopped by the Community Leadership Summit 2010 as I was preparing for OSCON this coming week. It is an open unconference-style event, now in its second year, that's held the weekend before OSCON. Everyone who attends is welcome to lead and contribute sessions on any topic that is relevant. In these discussion sessions the participants can interact directly,...
Crowdsourcing the search for aliens - The SETI Institute's Jill Tarter is looking for a few good filters.
July 12, 2010
Seti@Home brought distributed computing to the masses nearly a decade ago. Now, Jill Tarter and her SETI colleagues are upping the ante with a new telescope and a crowdsourced data-crunching project. Tarter, a speaker at the upcoming OSCON convention, discusses her work in this Q&A.
Four short links: 9 July 2010 - Crowdfunding, Biogrown Blood, MakerBot Spawn, and Real-Time Data
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 9, 2010
Reasons for Artists and Fans to Consider Crowdfunding -- the number of fans acquiring music outside traditional and/or legal means is, well, the majority. Plenty of examples of bands raising money outside the label system. DARPA's Blood Makers Start Pumping (Wired) -- biomanufactured blood. The blood was produced using hematopoietic cells, derived from embryonic cord-blood units. Currently, it takes...
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