Would you trust the "wisdom of the crowd" over your own doctor? CrowdMed thinks you might. The San Francisco start-up has an audacious plan to use crowdsourcing techniques to tap the "collective wisdom" of strangers to help diagnose patients - particularly those who've bounced from doctor to doctor for years trying to understand uncommon symptoms. 

While many may worry that healthcare is too important to trust to strangers, I think this is awesome. 

After all, crowdsourcing is already used to help find missing persons, track down terrorists, answer life's vexing questions, pick stocks - and to select our President. SETI uses crowdsourcing to search for extraterrestrial life. Why not employ crowdsourcing to help our multi-trillion-dollar healthcare industry? 

CrowdMed recently received $1.1 million in seed financing from some of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms, including NEA, Greylock Partners, Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz. 

Ask Your Doctor? No. Ask the Crowd.

CrowdMed works like this: Patients pay a $199 fee to list their case on CrowdMed. They fill out a "patient questionnaire" that details their symptoms, case history and personal information. Though CrowdMed founder Jared Heyman declined to say exactly how many patients have enrolled so far, he claimed that there has been "pretty strong demand." Without the fee, Heyman explained, the site would be overwhelmed with patients who might not get diagnosed.

Once a case is posted, the crowd, what CrowdMed somewhat coyly terms "MDs" - for "medical detectives" - can review the patient's information and offer up what they believe is the correct - or most likely - diagnosis. 

According to Heyman, "close to 3,000 people have signed up as medical detectives." He said CrowdMed's "MDs" include doctors, residents and "regular people that like solving medical mysteries." Why sign up to be a medical detective? First, there's the chance to help patients. Second, CrowdMed awards its detectives "points" for the diagnoses they correctly predict. 

CrowdMed utilizes a so-called prediction market methodology to help glean the correct diagnosis. For example, when a detective selects a case to review, they use up some of their points. They use up still more when they suggest a diagnosis or vote up (or down) other suggested diagnoses. Essentially, it "costs" to play. The more accurate their predictions, however, the more points they are ultimately awarded. 

Points do not have any cash value, however. For now, they can be exchanged only for donations to Watsi, an organization that helps fund medical treatments in the developing world. Heyman did not say how much CrowdMed is donating.

While it's true that CrowdMed's detectives may not always correctly diagnose a particular patient, if they can narrow the likelihood of someone's illness to, say, two or three likely options - those that garner the most points, for example - that could speed up decision making and help point to which tests should be perfomed. 

In Crowd We Trust?

The obvious question: Can a crowd of strangers with unknown amounts of medical expertise be trusted to safely and correctly diagnose baffling medical problems? CrowdMed claims that after "four years of development" it possess a patented "unique technology" specifically designed to optimize group intelligence for medical diagnostic purposes. From its site:

Groups hold far more knowledge collectively than any individual member, no matter how brilliant. With hundreds of minds working in parallel, groups can process information much faster than individuals.

Heyman told me that his sister suffered for three years from a rare disease. Once it was finally correctly diagnosed, doctors were able to significantly ease her symptoms. CrowdMed used her case to help validate its model - Heyman says it accurately diagnosed her within days. 

What Do Real MDs Think?

The first rule of medicine is primum non nocere, Latin for "first, do no harm." It does not necessarily apply to the crowd. Not surprisingly, the CrowdMed approach bothers many real doctors.

Dr. Hubert Chen, the Associate Medical Director for biotech pioneer Genentech, said, "I want to be enthusiastic, but I have concerns about it." Dr. Chen's primary concern was the potential for numerous "false positives" that CrowdMed's "detectives" might generate: "I've seen many patients misled by the Web. Doctors often have to un-educate them."

Dr. Aaron Roland, wo runs a family practice in northern California and is an associate clinical professor at UC San Francisco, had different concerns. "I wouldn't pay $200," Rolan said. He also wondered whether CrowdMed could attract the scale it needs. "Crowdsourcing is good when there's a lot of people in the crowd," he said, "but until you get that crowd, I'm suspicious."

Industry Connections

To help attract the required crowd, Heyman recruited Clare Martorana, the long-time editor of WebMD, to help support CrowdMed's outreach efforts. 

Not surprisingly, Martorana was very positive about the concept. There are many "experts," she said, not necessarily doctors, who may have suffered from a particular disease, or have a family member who has suffered, and whom can now contribute to the site.

She hopes to "reach out" to staffers - not just doctors - at medical research, counseling and support organizations that concentrate on specific issues - think, autism, for example, or Parkinson's dioease - and encourage them to participate in CrowdMed.

Martorana also suggested crowdsourcing diagnoses could be a boon for health insurance companies: "If you are insured and going to multiple specialists, but not getting relief, that costs a lot of money - you, your employer, your insurer all must bear those costs. At some point, there probably will be a pretty significant revenue stream for CrowdMed coming from insurance companies. Right now, their cost numbers are staggering."

Staggering Potential

The relatively paltry $1.1 million CrowdMed has raised so far suggest that investors remain unsure of the idea's potential risks and rewards. But connecting patients with chronic medical symptoms to experts, regardless of their titles, clearly holds massive disruptive potential. CrowdMed's ambitious, even inspiring idea is to use connectivity, collaboration and collective intelligence to help people avoid needless suffering. Despite the risks, it seems like it's a worth a try to me.

See also

• Social Revolution: Crowdsourcing For Change
• The Problem With Crowdsourcing Crime Reporting In The Mexican Drug War
• The Key To Crowdsourcing: Smarter Crowds

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. Images of Jared Heyman and Carly Heyman courtesy of CrowdMed. Image of Clare Martorana via LinkedIn.

The University of San Francisco launched a clever advertising campaign last year that stated, "There's no 'Moral Compass' app." Turns out that's not exactly true.

I'm not even talking about the apps MoralCompass or Moral Compass: The former is a rudimentary flow chart and the latter is more of a daily delivery of famous quotes and self-help mantras. The real moral compass for your smartphone is Seesaw, an app that lets you crowdsource decision making. It launched back in February and Seesaw Decisions Corp. announced its first major update Thursday morning. 

Seesaw's strength lies in helping users with basic queries aided by photos: Which hat should you buy, or what should you eat for lunch? The update loosens the chains weighing down Seesaw's sign-up process (you now can sign up using social media instead of your phone number), and as Seesaw's user base grows its crowdsourced decision-making assistance is beginning to expand into tricky questions about right and wrong.

Case in point: on Thursday morning one Seesaw user explained his groundhog problem and asked whether he should release the offending varmints or "make them vanish from the earth." The crowd answered early on by voting for 'eliminate for good'  (emphasized with a picture of a rifle), but eventually shifted towards 'catch and release' by 22-18. Groundhogs may be annoying, but killing is not the answer - at least that's what Seesaw users say. 

Spanning Preference To Morality 

The original purpose of Seesaw was not to let you ask thousands of strangers whether should, say, put your dog to sleep or break up with your significant other. Its intended function was to help users get affirmation and organize advice based on the opinion and who supplied it. 

"Often times I'll ask my friends for feedback, and I'll already know the answer. You're just looking for moral support and encouragement. You need that reinforcement to do it," explains Aaron Gotwalt, Seesaw's founder. If you're really trying to make a tough decision, you want input from the people whose opinions you value. "There are the people that are important to you, and then there's everyone else," Gotwalt says. 

The new update lets you both sign up and log in through social media accounts like Facebook. (Because Facebook and Twitter don't let Seesaw access the API that would let the app send invites, getting your friends to start using it is still handled via SMS.) Seesaw is working on letting you split votes by social network so that you could compare what your Facebook friends think you should do against advice from other circles.

Can An App Provide A Moral Compass?

For me, Seesaw becomes truly fascinating when moral issues come into play. Not only did Steve the potential groundhog exterminator get a lesson in animal ethics, he got valuable insight into what others might do in his shoes. 

My first Seesaw question addressed whether or not I should crowdsource my moral decision making. (How meta is that?) Not surprisingly, strangers on the app overwhelmingly think I should. But my query also exposes flaws in Seesaw's ability to serve as a true moral compass. 

For one, as everyone knows, it's far easier to tell someone else what to do than it is to make actually make a decision yourself. I have no reason to think people didn't answer my question seriously, but they could have just found it funny. As for Steve's groundhog problem, a yes-or-no question can't possibly get at all the nuances of the situation.

Then there's the follow up issue. Steve has no particular incentive to actually follow through on the crowd's suggestion. It'd be an interesting addition if Seesaw could let users notify the crowd what they actually decided to do. 

Obviously, Seesaw is more focused on its ability to gather friends around simple decisions centered on clothing, accessory purchases or food, and the app is a solid decision-making tool for these relatively trivial situations.

Crowdsourcing moral decisions, on the other hand, is uncharted territory. Seesaw is inadvertently emerging as a leader in this space. At the very least, when it comes to letting a crowd make decisions for you, Seesaw is a better choice than turning yourself into a publicly owned company.   

Veronica Mars, the critically acclaimed, little-watched television show from the mid-2000s was dead, buried — and nearly forgotten.

I saved it. With my iPhone.

I downloaded the Kickstarter funding app from the App Store. With a swipe of a finger, and my mobile Amazon Account, I pledged $10 to help the producer finance a  movie based on the show. On Twitter, I told all my followers to do the same. Then, with a quick status update to my Facebook page, I encouraged my family and friends to do likewise — and to tell everyone they knew to follow suit. All told, it took less than five minutes, and now one of the best network TV series of the past ten years will live again, this time on the big screen. 

The new Veronica Mars movie has been greenlighted, its financing secured, the star — the lovely and talented Kristen Bell — is signed. Nothing to do now but type out a script. I should at least garner a “producer” credit. The Motion Picture Academy is welcome to thank me at next year's Oscar ceremony. 

On second thought, maybe the Academy should fear me. For I did not merely save Veronica Mars, I am leading the charge to destroy the entire film industry as we know it. My weapons? The technology I carry around with with me everyday. A smartphone, an app, cloud services, crowdfunding, social media and online payments. 

Explosions In The Film Industry

The total gross film receipts in the U.S. last year were just under $11 billion. The average box-office take of a Hollywood film was a middling $16.5 million. This does not include international box office receipts, DVD sales, streaming or network television. The world consumes massive quantities of entertainment. Yes, we have a choice in what we watch and when and where but almost no choice, no direct say whatsoever, in what actually gets made, or by whom. This has always been the case — until now. 

Despite its near-universal appeal, there may be no industry that’s more insular, more inexplicable to the very public it appeals to than the film industry. Technology is changing all of this, exploding the industry outward and, finally, fully empowering those who buy the tickets. Yes, technology has radically impacted the industry itself — think amazing special effects, 3D, green screens, post-production wizardry. We can now download or stream our favorite films and TV series to watch them anywhere at any time — legally or otherwise. But until now, we were effectively powerless in what got made.

No longer. Veronica Mars will likely be only among the first of many multi-million-dollar Hollywood flicks that are produced solely because of the efforts of individuals scattered around the world, pledging anywhere from $1 and $10,000, and sharing their enthusiasm on social media. The crowd is no longer simply marketed to, but is now driving what gets made from the start. 

Crowdfunding

Wikipedia defines crowdfunding as "the collective effort of individuals who network and pool their money, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations." Rob Thomas, the creator of the original Veronica Mars series, spent years attempting to turn his creation into a film. Until he turned to the crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, he failed every time. From The New York Times:

In its three seasons on the air “Veronica Mars” was never even one of television’s Top 100 most-watched series, but in its afterlife it has broken new ground. On Wednesday night fans and supporters of that show about a wisecracking young sleuth (played by Kristen Bell) pledged more than $2 million to produce a “Veronica Mars” movie, less than 12 hours after the fund-raising drive was announced on Kickstarter.

Mr. Thomas told fans they had 30 days to raise $2 million for “our shot” at producing a film, adding, “I believe it’s the only one we’ve got.” And by about 9 p.m. that goal was met, with pledges continuing to come in on Day 2.  

The Web, social media, online payment services — and the always-on connectivity our smartphones provide us — are enabling an entirely new form of financing. These technologies are a;sp enabling anyone to pursue their creative vision or build a better mousetrap by appealing not to a skeptical venture capitalis or a cynical producer, but to regular people who may share a similar passion or interest. The technologies we have in our pockets are simultaneously empowering us to both create our visions and fund those whose visions.

A Funding Platform for Creative Projects

For the Veronica Mars project on Kickstarter, fans could pledge from $10 to more than $10,000, with various goodies offered at each level. For $10, the “backer” receives a PDF of the shooting script on the day of the movie’s release. For $10,000, a speaking role was offered.

Of course, Veronica Mars is a project with a built-in core of fans. Not all crowdsourced projects have that kind of juice to get to their funding goals.

But here's how it might work: A budding young filmmaker uses her smartphone to record a two-minute ‘pitch’ that she uploads to YouTube. Enough people react positively that she makes a Kickstarter project — seeking, for example, $1 million to make her movie and another $1 million to help market it. Not easy, but it might just work — even for people who would otherwise have no shot at raising that kind of money.. 

Crowdfunding, cloud services and mobile devices are remaking filmmaking and film financing. But let's not stop at funding Veronica Mars. The audience still doesn't have an financial stake in the creative endeavors we support. What if Veronica Mars turns out to be a blockbuster? Shouldn't I get a piece of those profits? After all, I was an early financial backer. 

It's not like I'm asking to be onstage at the Oscars with Rob Thomas. Although....

Images from Veronica Mars Kickstarter project video.

If you tuned into the Presidential debates this past Fall you may have caught the one moderated by CNN personality Candy Crowley. Remarkably, it was the first presidential debate moderated by a female in 20 years. Wonder how that dry spell ended? Because of a petition created at Change.org.

Debate organizers were influenced by three Montclair, N.J. high school students, who, inspired by a civics class, were able to sign up more than 180,000 supporters for their online petition.

30 Million Signatures

One of the biggest challenges of finding innovative new ways of doing things is monetization, and that's where Change.org shines. The company has in effect become a marketing machine for mostly non-profit organizations. It has also boosted its beneficial standing by becoming a certified B Corp.

Change.org is designed to make creating petitions easy, and features selected petitions on its home page.

Future Changes

The way Change.org works is simple. Anyone can start a petition for free, but qualified organizations can send sponsored petitions to specific Change.org members by paying a premium. “Every package is custom built for each sponsor,” Dulski says, adding that “we have people in house who know how to make petitions stronger.”

The future for sponsored Change.org petitioners seems bright. Dulski promises that the company is “going to develop a great analytics platform for sponsors, so we’re able to better reach the kind of people who are passionate about their causes.”

One recent victory had 200,000 Gatorade consumers using Change.org to demand the removal of the controversial ingredient BVO from its product bottles. Gatorade removed the ingredient, scoring a victory for the 15-year-old Mississippi teenager who started the petition.

International Action

While most of its biggest victories have been in the U.S., Change.org has become a global phenomenon. “We have staff in 18 countries,” notes Dulski. A perfect example of that global power was the petition calling for Malala Yyousafzai, the Pakistani girl shot for advocating female education, to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This petition, posted by Tarek Fatah of Toronto, has gained more than 287,000 supporters.

With influence comes power that translates into more galvanizing events - and that, in turn, attracts even more users. Do you have an innovation that could use the gravy train of a complementary business? Can you leverage the Time Compression Ubertrend to create a service that helps consumers save time? I’m ready to file my petition to help America become more innovative.

You may not know this but ReadWrite is owned by a company called Say Media, which owns a handful of other sites, including xoJane, whose readers are mostly women, and not just any women, but the kind who like to do naughty sex-type things and write about it on the Internet. Just check out this article about how to have Skype sex, by a woman who claims to have developed some expertise in this area.

So, right. Let's just say there's not much overlap between the xoJane audience and our audience here at ReadWrite. But that may be changing, because the deputy director of xoJane, Mandy Stadtmiller, is on a quest, and I think our readers can help.

You see, Mandy is looking for gigolo. And she wants the Interwebs to choose him. She is crowd-sourcing the decision and is letting readers vote on which of seven hunky dudes she should hire. The guys all work for a service called Cowboys4Angels, and they have names like "Vin Armani" and "Bradley Lords."

You can check out their photos here, or in Mandy's post on xoJane where she lays out her scheme, but I warn you, there are a lot of pulled-down tighty-whiteys, which might be NSFW, depending on where you W. For what it's worth, I'm voting for the gigolo who's out hiking in a cowboy hat, no shirt and plate-sized belt buckle, because why not?

Not only can you vote on the guy, you can also vote on which roleplaying fantasy Mandy should act out with the guy, and whatever readers decide, Mandy swears she will do it. Because that is just how she rolls.

Thank You, God, For The Internet

Cynics might see this as just a craven ploy by Stadtmiller to gin up pageviews, which it is. We got wind of it when one of our reporters, Dan Rowinski, happened to visit the New York office of Say Media, where xoJane's offices are located. Somehow Rowinski got talking to the staffers at xoJane, who told him that hey, we're working on a tech story, and maybe you guys at ReadWrite can write something with it. 

This was the gigolo project. Now, Rowinski is a shy lad who has led a sheltered life, and of course he was terrified. He managed to escape the clutches of the New York City lady monsters, and when I ran into him the next day he told me what they were up to. I knew right away that, frightening and awful as this is, we must get involved with this important sociological experiment. Plus here at long last was our chance to achieve synergy with our sisters in arms at xoJane.

I traded some mail with Stadtmiller this evening. She told me she came up with this idea after writing a somewhat disturbing post about depression and medication and sexual dysfunction, titled, "I've Been Going To Some Dark Sexual Places Lately In Fantasy - And It's Bumming Me Out." A sympathetic reader wrote in telling Stadtmiller she should do what the reader had done when she needed something to pick up her spirits, which was, "Go professional." In other words, hire an escort.

The reader told Stadtmiller about Cowboys4Angels. "I followed up as I knew it would be a fun, hilarious story," Stadtmiller tells me. "I decided to do the crowdsourcing angle because I'm a dork, and I love shit like that. This seemed like a terrific way to involve crowdsourcing in something that was sexy and sexual and fun --and encourage reader engagement."

Ah, yes. Reader engagement. We talk a lot about that at ReadWrite, too, but so far our ideas have been much less daring. The best we've done is give away a Nexus 7. Different strokes, I guess. We're bringing on a new editorial assistant next week. Maybe we can dream up dangerous and/or embarrassing things for him to do, and let readers choose his fate.

Sorry, No Sex

Stadtmiller, who just started a relationship, says she will act out some roleplay fantasies with the gigolo, but won't actually have sex with the guy, if only because "super handsome ripped guys aren't really my thing." The roleplay choices are pretty tame. There's no two-girls-one-cup action on the menu.

Stadtmiller has pulled a gigolo stunt before, when she was reporting for the New York Post and hired a "prosti-dude" at a brothel in Las Vegas and wrote about her experience. It's a hilarious read. Here's a clip of her talking about it on the Joy Behar show in 2010:

 Stadtmiller will go on the Joy Behar show later this month to talk about the new gigolo project, and to let that audience join in the voting. Then she'll choose her gigolo. 

"I'm just hoping for a great story and experience," she tells me. "I don't have trouble getting dates, but this is an experience where readers can live vicariously through me - especially with the crowdsourcing component." 

Is this what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he created the Web? Probably not. Anyway, here we are. The end times are upon us. Women are going crazy and turning into man-eating sex monsters. Next thing you know they'll want to vote. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going over to xoJane to choose a gigolo.

In the six years since Jeff Howe coined the term ‘crowdsourcing’ in Wired Magazine, the phenomenon has grown into several distinct, maturing industries that give businesses and workers almost limitless flexibility. But crowdsourcing also significantly changes the relationships betweeen employers and workers - and not necessarily for the better.

The 3 Types of Crowdsourcing

Howe’s definition of crowdsourcing (taken from a trailer for his book) is pretty straightforward, if a little broad:

Crowdsourcing is when a company takes a job that was once performed by employees and outsources it in the form of an open call to a large, undefined group of people, generally using the Internet.

Depending on how you interpret “job,” that definition could include crowd-based funding, like Kickstarter, crowd-based voting, and other community-driven decisions, but most commonly the term applies to marketplaces for soliciting work products.

Typically, businesses offer up a request for a block of work, like a logo, software coding, marketing copy, a website or a list of voicemail transcriptions - and the crowd answers the call. Those are the basics. Every crowdsourcing marketplace has its own rules and specialty, but generally, they break down into three categories:

1. Contests

2. Open Markets

3. Microwork

Each type of crowdsourcing requires a different approach to get the most value for the money and effort you put in - and to avoid the very real opportunity to anger your existing workers and contractors while exploiting crowdsourced contributors (assuming you care about that):

1. Contests: Contest marketplaces solicit responses as an open call and generally choose just one as a winner. The client purchases the winner’s work product with the award, and the losing entrants retain the rights to their work product. Contest specialties range in scope from small graphic design projects (Crowdspring) to substantial scientific quandries with awards in the tens of thousands of dollars (Innocentive).

Very few people have a problem with the top end of the contest crowdwourcing market, which tends to add unique value with sites like IdeaConnection and Xprize . Innocentive, for example, rewards creative thinking, requires domain expertise and helps identify talent that might otherwise remain buried. Plus, Innocentive participants are trying to solve important problems, not just grind out grunt work to pleases the corporate overlords. If you want to offer a million dollars to the first person who can cure acne, have at it. Everyone wins.

Low-end contest sites like Mycroburst are a different animal. In these situations, the majority of participants end up performing hours of work with zero compensation. A logo design project, for example, might start with 100 participants, then work through several rounds of revisions and cuts before settling on a winner, who might earn as little as $200,

For the winner, if there is one, the reward might barely justify the expense. For everyone else, it’s a total bust.

To mitigate this situation, some contest sites have created secondary marketplaces (like the 99 designs Logo Store) to help artists recoup at least some money from non-winning work. Still, contests conjure the specter of ‘spec work’, and many artists have attempted to organize boycotts of them as abusive exploitation.

So what’s the right approach? At the very least, companies need to be honest about what they can spend and what they need when they create a crowdsource contest. And they need to be realistic about what they’re likely to get - a competent if not brilliant solution to an immediate problem. If that’s all you need, a crowdsourced contest could be all you need.

In most cases, though, if you can afford to actually hire a designer or a coder, you’ll get better work, more consistency, with far less ongoing management effort.

2. Open Markets: Marketplaces like oDesk, eLance, Guru, and Mechanical Turk allow employers to post nearly any job at any price, leading to a wide range of offers, from 20-minute typing assignments to complex, multi-week software development projects.

Open markets are generally free of stigma, but managing the projects can become a full-time job. Job posters often need to sift through a number of low-quality providers (or high-quality providers with the wrong domain expertise) before finding the right match. A poorly-defined job description will compound this problem, attracting too broad a range of applicants, and discouraging the real pros who don’t want to waste their time.

If you aren’t completely sure what you need, you may do better hiring a local to work through the process on-site. If you really do know what you want, be as specific as possible in your posting, and create a quick qualification process on which everyone in your office agrees.

3. Microwork: Microwork marketplaces break up large, repetitive projects into very small, discrete chunks that are managed by a highly-automated software. In most cases, the need for microwork will be driven by specific projects.

Microwork marketplaces typically focus on a specific type of work. For example, Microtask focuses on very large projects involving text and data recognition – specifically, handwritten, damaged or stylized text that computers can’t read. It has built its entire user interface and back end around increasing worker productivity for this very specific job, and the majority of its tasks take only a few seconds to complete.

Crowdsourcing task work is a delicate decision, since it pulls hours from an in-house team, needs to integrate with in-house workflows, requires a very well-definied data specification and requires a certain amount of trust in data quality.

When it works, crowdsourcing microwork can be brilliant. When it doesn’t, it’s a train wreck. Before entering into a contract for microwork, it’s criticial to nail down the specs, do your homework (and check lots of references), and give as much power as possible to the project leads so they can make the process work as efficiently as possible.

Crowds are a great resource and a trove of valuable information - when they work. When they don’t, it doesn’t take much to question the wisdom of the crowd.

In Sunday’s New York Times, David Leonhardt gave a primer on crowdsourcing, complete with the failure of crowds to predict the Supreme Court’s recent health care decision. That decision gave critics of crowdsourcing fodder for attacking the model, but Leonhardt was quick to point out that the so-called experts and insiders are often just as flawed in their own predictions.

“The answer, I think, is to take the best of what both experts and markets have to offer, realizing that the combination of the two offers a better window onto the future than either alone,” he wrote. “Markets are at their best when they can synthesize large amounts of disparate information, as on an election night. Experts are most useful when a system exists to identify the most truly knowledgeable — a system that often resembles a market.”

Put another way, when everyone has access to the same information and is trying to make sense of it, crowds can be useful. But when only a few insiders have the information - an as-yet unannounced Supreme Court ruling, for example - crowds are all but useless.

“Crowdsourcing is a model, not magic – no different than outsourcing or SaaS. And similar to these other models, there are companies that do it exceedingly well, and those that do it poorly,” said Matt Johnson, who heads marketing at Boston-based uTest, a crowdsourced software testing firm. “And similar to most movements that gain traction, there’s more than a little hope-hype-hate cyclicality that goes with it.”

Not All Crowds Are Created Equal

The original model for crowdsourcing - and one still employed by many firms - was more is more. The idea was that the bigger the crowd you used, the better the end result, be it a prediction, a product or a logo design.

Peter H. LaMotte, president of GeniusRocket Inc., said the firm was originally founded to compete in the spec space for design, in which firms compete on spec to design logos, branding campaigns or, in the case of GeniusRocket, video production.

The problem with contests is that creative talent only gets paid if their content is selected, while commissioning firms have less input over the final product and may lose control over their brand to contest losers who try to use the content elsewhere. GeniusRocket shifted its business model to what it calls a “curated crowdsourcing” approach, which starts with curating who can be a part of the crowd that pitches ideas.

“This makes sure that professionals, not amateurs or students, make up the crowd,” LaMotte said. “These professionals pitch ideas based upon a client's brief. The best ideas move forward and are compensated; the ideas that are not selected remain the property of the team that pitched it... . This is the crowdsourcing element: The crowd delivers the best ideas. GeniusRocket turns them into storyboards, and uses crowdsourcing to validate the ideas like a virtual focus group. We then have a second crowd of production companies that will bid for the work. The best-suited team at the right price wins the production.”

Creating a request for Mechanical Turk isn't overly difficult, but it takes a bit of time editing HTML and answering a lot of questions for which first-time users don't have a lot of context - for example, deciding the qualifications for workers, or whether they need to be "masters" to take on a task.

Amazon is streamlining all that with the Categorization App by making assumptions about what its users would want, providing suggested pricing and helping to create the form that workers will see.

Right now, Amazon is providing an app only for categorization questions. Mechanical Turk offers templates for many more, including image filtering, image tagging, data extraction, data collection and several others. Expect that Amazon will add apps for most of these types of questions in the near future.

Boosting MT Revenues

Obviously, Amazon is trying to streamline the process for creating MT tasks in order to boost its revenue. More tasks means more money. But there's a bit more to it than that.

With the Categorization App, Amazon's assumptions all lead to more money per HIT. Users no longer have to decide what kind of worker to farm tasks out to; rather, Amazon makes that decision, automatically choosing the most expensive (master) workers. To increase accuracy, each HIT will be shown to two users by default, doubling the revenue.

Amazon will also suggest a pay level, to ensure that HITs are "priced attractively" to workers. Requesters can change this, but if a significant number of requesters accept the default pricing, that will probably drive HIT prices up over time.

Better Requests

Another reason that Amazon would want to create an app for MT requests is that a lot of requests are not very good. Amazon is in a position to evaluate the existing requests, and has found them wanting.

One problem? Too many categories. Amazon says that the maximum number of categories that workers can keep in mind is seven to 10. Yet they see requests with more than 150 categories!

The app limits requesters to 10 items. It requires that requesters provide instructions. It's not foolproof, but it provides better odds that requesters will generate reasonable HITs. If requesters want more categories, they need to start from scratch with a custom template.

If you're using Mechanical Turk now, what do you think of the Categorization App? Would you prefer to see Amazon simplify the service further, or is it already well-suited for the kind of crowdsourcing that you're doing?

Illustration titled "Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot" by Flickr user Mike Licht.

The National Endowment for the Arts has not funded visual artists since 1993. But it once did fund controversial work, like that of Robert Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio series, which featured images of homoeroticism, BDSM and classical nudes. That body of work was included in a traveling exhibition called "The Perfect Moment," which was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. But not for long.

It was only a matter of time before the NEA would stop funding individual visual artists all together. Take, for example, the 1993 case of the NEA Four, which includes performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes. In June 1990, their proposed NEA grants were vetoed by John Frohnmayer because of the artworks' highly politicized subject matter. The NEA Four filed suit against the NEA, and Frohnmayer was forced to resign. Even though the artists won their court case in 1993 and were awarded the grant money, after all was said and done, the NEA stopped funding individual artists.

Today the NEA funds visual arts through grants and organizations that "serve the needs of and enhance opportunities for artists and their audience." The NEA claims that it is committed to advancing the work of contemporary visual artists, but that's not what individual visual artists had to say.

Cleveland's SPACES Gallery, Recipient of NEA Grants

Ask anyone who has received an NEA grant, and they'll tell you that there's a lot of legwork involved. Christopher Lynn, the executive director of Cleveland's SPACES Gallery, tells ReadWriteWeb that the gallery has an ongoing relationship with the NEA. It receives money for the SPACES World Artist Program, an artist residency that brings in local artists from around the world.

"The NEA seems to be on board with it because it deals with issues of cultural exchange and enrichment of the national and local landscape, in addition to bringing in international artists," says Lynn.

Yet the process for getting an NEA is "long and arduous," he says. "It requires budgets (last year's and next year's), images, information on previous artists to recap on where we have been, and proposed upcoming artists." Even if you do receive an NEA, the organization expects the organization to pay upfront, so the entire grant functions more like a reimbursement process. "You get the money at the end of the grant period, rather than get the money upfront, which can be tricky if you don't have the cash function." This reverse-like funding happens because organizations or individuals have, in the past, abused the privilege of receiving money upfront.

Lynn says the best word to describe the NEA is "traditional."

In a lot of ways, Kickstarter is a far easier route than applying for an NEA grant, or any grant, for that matter. And judging by the success artists have had with Kickstarter, it's hard to rationalize not doing it. Except for that whole small government thing.

Artist Steve Lambert: Kickstarter Is a Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem

Steve Lambert raised money using Kickstarter for a project not-so-ironically titled "Capitalism Works for Me." This project, as he says, was "more ambitious than what a nonprofit could do," and there was a limited timeline for the project. So he jumped on Kickstarter, and in only 30 days he was able to raise $16,000. Does this mean capitalism works? Or government is broken? Or neither at all? Lambert asks friends on Kickstarter to make capitalism work for him.

"There were 434 people who now are connected to the project, even if they only gave a dollar," says Lambert of the Kickstarter fund. "Plus there's this accountability to the public - it's not just me being like, 'Hey, this is great!' The idea needs to be supported for it to move forward."

Lambert only turned to Kickstarter after other avenues proved to not work quite as well. "I had tried to do different forms of the Capitalism Works for Me through other institutions and it didn't work," he says. "Some were like, 'No, that's not what we do,' and others were willing to show but not put the money behind it. If you're challenging institutions or capitalism or the government, it's good to be able to go outside of it."

Or, in other words, if you're making work that's controversial and perhaps not as family-friendly, you'll probably have to find alternate means of funding. Take the controversy that Mapplethorpe caused, for example. "The federal government has not given money to individual artists for decades," he says. "Other countries don't do this." When it comes to work like Mapplethorpe's, for example, even if you don't like it, "it has value," says Lambert.

Kickstarter is a short-term solution to a long-term problem, to continued government cuts to the arts.

"We have billions of dollars going into war," says Lambert. "We need to be having that conversation. Kickstarter fills a need; it should always be there. But within the nonprofits, I hear them say things like 'That program got cut so we're gonna do a crowdfunding thing.' And it's like whoa, whoa, what are we doing to fight the cuts?!"

Kickstarter is well aware of this problem, too. When ReadWriteWeb originally reported the news that Kickstarter was on track to outfund the National Endowment for the Arts, we also noted something that Kickstarter Co-Founder Yancey Strickler said: "But maybe it shouldn't be that way," Strickler said. "Maybe there's a reason for the state to strongly support the arts."

Queer Filmmaker Wendy Jo Carlton: The Closed World of NEA

Two years ago, Chicago-based queer filmmaker Wendy Jo Carlton needed to raise funds for her indie film about two girls in love, Jamie & Jessie Are Not Together. She turned to Kickstarter instead of a complicated, paperwork-heavy grant because, as she tells ReadWriteWeb, it just made more sense - especially considering the subject matter she was tackling.

"I haven't applied for really big grants probably because they're so daunting - the time and the paperwork, the content that you already have to have such a clear, concise idea expressed in written form, plus you need budgets," says Carlton. "It took a lot of time to prepare for Kickstarter - it's like your own storefront, and you figure out what you want your storefront to look like. And you can be a lot more creative."

As opposed to the Internet, a broadcast-to-the-masses type of platform, the Kickstarter campaign acts as "its own broadcast without being too idiosyncratic," she says.

The NEA isn't exactly focused on connecting to the social-networked masses.

"I associate the NEA with access. You have to do a lot more legwork to understand what kind of language they want you to be speaking. It's like this insider-y thing, and to me, I associate that to upper-middle class background and Ivy League people, and people who know people or they've lived in New York most of their lives and are already connected. That's not my background. I'm a working-class background, and for me it's empowering to know how someone wants you to dance if they're going to be throwing money at you for the dance."

Of course, Americans' tax dollars fund the NEA grants. But that's beside the point.

"It's connected to federal funding, which is taxpayer money, and I smell some right-wing agenda in the comparison because the NEA and Kickstarter are not in the same playing field to compare."

Rainb0wLightening: We Are an ADD Culture. Get Over It.

Akron, Ohio-based artist Chelsea Blackerby of artist collective Rainb0wLightening used Kickstarter to raise funds. But it's not something that she was particularly thrilled about. Using Kickstarter, she was able to raise a quick $2,000 for her sculpture project Dreamscape Memory Cave, a collection of personal memories and stories gathered over one year. They line the walls of this sentimental space. With 48 backers, rainb0wLightning raised the money. But the Kickstarter platform seemed to be more of a burden than a success, at least in terms of community building.

"People are really busy, everyone is demanding their attention, and that's our culture," says Blackerby. "That's kind of what our piece is about. We're asking people to stop their ADD and really slow down and experience themselves."

A project like this doesn't really make sense on the Internet, the exact type of medium that the artist is trying to combat.

"Kickstarter does a good job of making you feel like you had a direct hand, and it's unique in that way because it does take out the middle man," says Blackerby. "But it's kind of like throwing money at the RedCross or a philanthropic organization. You want your money to go somewhere good."

Images via Shutterstock.com and VisitSteve.com, Wendy Jo Carlton and Rainb0wLightening.

Co-Founder Yancey Strickler said today in an interview with Talking Points Memo that Kickstarter might actually crowdsource fund $150 million in 2012, which is $4 million more than the National Endowment for the Arts' 2012 operating budget of $146 million.

Depending on where you stand, this could either be a great success for democratic crowd-sourced arts funding. Or is this just a scary realization of just how ridiculously underfunded the NEA is?

PopSci.com reports that the Canadian Council for the Arts has a budget of around $181 million USD, and a population that's one-tenth of the United States. Keep in mind that the types of projects that see funding on Kickstarter are different from those that receive money from the NEA.

For example, something like the iPod Nano multi-touch watch has received $942,578 in total; its original goal was a mere $15,000. There are 13,512 backers on this project. The Departure Game App, a video games project based in Brooklyn, New York, already surpassed its $3,000 goal, gathering a total $5,131 with 196 backers and seven days to go.

Take a stroll through some of the NEA's recent grant recipients. The Boston Jewish Film Festival, Inc., received $10,000 and the Blue Ridge Traditional Arts, Inc. in Galax, Virginia, just got $30,000 to support traditional music programming at the Blue Ridge Music Center. Surely, there are some overlaps between the NEA and Kickstarter. Rather than pitting them side-by-side, however, it is perhaps more useful to think about them as complimenting each other.

Strickler tells TPM that the amount of money Kickstarter distributes this year is a number that they view "in both a good and a bad way." Yes, Kickstarter can drive as much money to the arts as a federal agency, which means that more artists will have money for projects. "But maybe it shouldn't be that way," Strickler says, "Maybe there's a reason for the state to strongly support the arts."

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Long popular for their work building games with major studios, the Double Fine team decided they wanted to self-produce and document the creation of an old-fashioned point and click adventure game. They are probably just a few hours away from breaking $1 million raised from backers on Kickstarter, they are already the new record holders for the fastest to raise so much and to receive backing from so many individual funders. Update: Adding tens of thousands of dollars every 15 minutes, the project just passed $1m.

"[This] is kind of a big deal," wrote game journalist Jim Squires at Gamezebo this morning.

"Not just for Double Fine, but for Kickstarter and the industry as a whole. Can you imagine what the gaming world would look like if big developers like this could raise the funds needed to get to market without a publisher? Sure it's worked for indies, but we're talking Tim Schaefer here. Between Tim and Ron Gilbert (also now with Double Fine), these are the people that defined the LucasArts era of adventure games."

In other words, this is a case of the famous getting more famous on a new platform - directly with their own fame instead of with a traditional publisher's help. The same was true of LunaTik, the previous Kickstarter champ. Cool stories, but the democratization of fundraising thus deserves to be understood with a grain of salt.

Game blog Joystiq reported:

"'I can confirm that there's not been a project that has raised as much as this one in such a short timeframe,' [a Kickstarter] spokesperson revealed. Kickstarter says it does not keep a running tally finalized projects, but its listing of 'Most Funded' ventures shows a number of concepts that came close to the one million dollar mark, since 2009.

"The Kickstarter spokesperson also confirmed that Double Fine's project 'now has more backers than any other project on the site.' The current total of backers sits at over 17,000." [It's now up to 25k+]

The Gamification of Game Creation

I don't know as much about gaming as either of the two writers above, but I'm learning about gamification. The Gamification.org wiki lists a number of game dynamics that I think are at play in this, if not every, Kickstarter campaign.

Epic Meaning to the fundraising Quest, because funders are challenging authority and changing the world.

The challenge to big game publishers and their conventional wisdom that point-and-click adventure games are dead confers what Gamification experts call Epic Meaning to the (in this case highly accelerated) fundraising Quest, because funders are challenging authority and changing the world. The Achievements and Reward Schedules that all Kickstarter campaigns are encouraged to include are aided by the Urgent Optimism created by the record-breaking pace of this campaign in particular, the strong reputation of the team being backed, the relatively immediate gratification of games themselves and the fact that a David vs Goliath story always has some amount of urgency to it.

There is clearly a Countdown and participants are racing it with a combination of Ownership, Community Collaboration and Virality. Finally, the Kickstarter updates in general and the video documentation of this game's creation both fit within what Gamification analysts call Cascading Information Theory. "The theory," the Gamification.org wiki explains, "that information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative."

Put all that within the context of a known brand (the game makers themselves), the well-executed but still-fresh infrastructure of Kickstarter and the end result of a game that is easy to afford ($15 gets you a download on Steam when it's done), and you've got a recipe for some gamified game creation. In this case, record levels of game creation.

As Jane McGonigal tweeted to Double Fine's Tim Schaefer this afternoon, "@TimOfLegend You're making us all feel like we're a part of something historic ^_^"

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/02/09/meet_the_new_kings_of_kickstarter_how_double_fine http://readwrite.com/2012/02/09/meet_the_new_kings_of_kickstarter_how_double_fine Crowdsourcing Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:09:25 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Darling of the crowdfunders, Kickstarter released its stats for the past year, and there is a lot of data to digest. The total number of projects is more than double from last year, the success rates for funding them is up slightly, and the total dollars pledged is close to a $100 million, which is more than triple what was pledged last year. Overall, more projects were able to meet their funding goals last year than all projects that were launched in 2009. With coverage on NBC's "Rock Center" news magazine and five of their funded films playing last year at Sundance, clearly they have come into their own.

We wrote about their best of 2010 and also >covered them earlier in the fall .

Some of the projects they highlighted in their year-end blog were last minute fights to funding. Others got funded right off the bat, such as this elegant iPhone Elevation Dock, as you can see from the chart below showing the funding process over time. The TikTok, one of their most famous projects that added a watch band to your iPod Nano, was so popular that it is now being sold in the Apple stores.

The blog post also has links to the favorite pitch videos, some of them are quite amusing and interesting, like this one that publishes a new limited-edition version of Huck Finn that reimages the Jim character as a neutral-sounding robotic character.

But what is most interesting is the funding process from its biggest benefactors According to the company, one individual (the company didn't release any identities) backed more than 700 projects: that is a lot of donations and a lot of swag. Others in the top ten backed hundreds of projects.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/01/15/the_year_in_review_at_kickstarter http://readwrite.com/2012/01/15/the_year_in_review_at_kickstarter Analysis Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:00:00 -0800 David Strom Mocality, a Kenya-based crowd-sourced web and mobile business listings company, has accused Google of fraudulently stealing its customers. In a blog post today, Mocality's CEO Stefan Magdalinski maintained that Google has targeted its database, the core of its company, and lied to its users in an attempt to get them to join up with Google Africa's Getting Kenyan Businesses Online (GKBO) program.

Shortly after GKBO began in September, Mocality "started receiving some odd calls" from customers who were confused by pitches to build them websites that came from Google in apparent partnership with Mocality. There was no such partnership and Mocality claimed to discover it was Google lying to its customers to bring them into GKBO.

Google has released a statement which we have included at the end of the article after the jump.

Mocality did some pretty deep forensics on their traffic and discovered a specific IP, which used a Kenyan ISP and utlized the latest Chrome build, was extensively accessing their business listings. So on December 21, they re-directed a percentage of the inquiries from that IP to a page that gave a different phone number - one that connected to the Mocality call center. The calls that came in were startling.

Here's an example, a call from someone identifying himself as Douglas, from Google Kenya, who tells the person who answered the phone, whom he believes is a business owner using Mocality, that Google and Mocality are collaborating on a new website service. Another call, available here in transcript, has the speaker accusing Mocality itself of fraud. They estimated the team identified as Google Kenya made 20-25 calls per hour to Mocality customers.

After a Christmas break, Magdalinski said there were no more instances of access from that IP. Instead, a new trend started from an Indian IP which belongs to Google. The calls began again, but this time from India. Here's an example, starring a caller named "Deepthi."

"It looks like Google has now outsourced the Getting Kenya Businesses Online operation to India!" wrote Magdalinski. He continued:

"When we started this investigation, I thought that we'd catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Google that they were violating our Terms and conditions (sections 9.12 and 9.17, amongst others), someone would get a slap on the wrist, and life would continue.

"I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents."

We contacted Joseph Mucheru, Google's senior lead for Sub-Saharan Africa. We met and interviewed him in October in his office at Google's Nairobi headquarters where we talked, among other things, about the GKBO program. We have yet to hear back from him. We also contacted Magdalinski. If either respond, we will update this article.

Forbes reported that Google's policy manager for Africa, Ory Okholloh, said the company would make a statement by the end of the day. It is the end of the day in Kenya and all we have been able to get is a boilerplate line from Google's corporate PR department.

"These are clearly very serious allegations, and we are doing everything possible to investigate them."

Other publications, including The Register, have carried a different statement.

"We're aware that a company in Kenya has accused us of using some of their publicly available customer data without permission. We are investigating the matter and will have more information as soon as possible."

Clearly, Google is looking to shift the focus onto the fact that the information in Mocality's database was user generated. However, as Magdalinski notes on his Twitter account, "The real issue is not taking 30% of our 'publicly available db' - it's what was said to our customers on the calls."

UPDATE: Here is the statement from Nelson Mattos, Vice-President for Product and Engineering, Europe and Emerging Markets:

"We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality's data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We've already unreservedly apologized to Mocality. We're still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we'll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved."

As Matt McGee notes on Marketing Land:

"The statement doesn't specifically say that Google itself was doing the scraping and attempting to contact Mocality's customers. By saying 'a team of people working on a Google project,' Google keeps open the possibility of placing responsibility for the incident on third party contractors - which is similar to what happened last week when Google said that ad agencies were responsible for a poorly-executed sponsored blog post campaign for Google Chrome."

During my conversation with Mucheru in October, he spoke of GKBO as a Google program, conducted by the Kenya office he oversees, and not by a contracted group. If this was inaccurate, I hope he will correct it in his response to ReadWriteWeb's questions.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/01/13/google_allegedly_poached_african_competitor http://readwrite.com/2012/01/13/google_allegedly_poached_african_competitor Crowdsourcing Fri, 13 Jan 2012 02:44:00 -0800 Curt Hopkins OK, this isn't working anymore. Too many people either don't have a job or the ones that do are predominantly dissatisfied. We've been talking about networked organisations and distributed work for decades, but productivity gains have been dim the past ten years. Everything worked just well enough to not think about structural changes. We tried to apply collaboration and fancy search platforms like new paint on a crumbling house that could be fixed.

But because neither renovation nor innovation did catch up at the speed of our economic development, we crashed. And that's, like with every disrupting event, a tremendous opportunity. It forces us to rethink, because it pushes us beyond the tipping point we tried to avoid for so long.

Bruno is a European-born entrepreneur currently busy building a simple marketplace for professional services, work|i|o. His previous company developed algorithmic strategies for startups and global companies like McKinsey, Deutsche Telecom or Daimler.

Here's how it could work.

Currently the not perfectly labelled crowdsourcing is associated with the negative touch of cheap designer specwork and lowest possible labour costs. Despite even that working very well commercially, the real potential will show itself in the next iterations of this trend:

The reason we have company structures and processes, and by now organizations that are being deemed not only too big to fail but also too big to run, is that it was the most efficient way since the industrial revolution. Hiring, training and retaining employees for the assembly line is certainly more effective than trying to build cars with different people each day.

But the web, just like with the music industry, accounting and even your x-ray exams, could do something remarkable to white collar work itself: Making it portable. And turn the whole system upside down. It's now way less complex to tell people who you are and what you need than to tell them what to do. There are tons of people out there who know exactly what they're doing in their respective field. Smart people who even understand your most complex needs.

But the web, just like with the music industry, accounting and even your x-ray exams, could do something remarkable to white collar work itself: Making it portable. And turn the whole system upside down.

So why again is the relationship revolving around permanent affiliation, and not expertise? Why do companies stovepipe ever increasing complexity into the same static workforce? And why do people stick to jobs that only allow them to do what they really like and are all about in some fraction of their time spent in these jobs?

Using the web to describe whats needed and thus making work more liquid could launch an exceptional shift in how we work: Imagine being able to have the right talent at your fingertips, no matter what the tasks are about today. Or were yesterday. And will be tomorrow.

Imagine being able to design your day, every day: A Twitter style timeline containing work units that are customized to your real interests, expertise and aspirations, aggregated from sources and services around the world.

CrowdConf2011, the industry meeting this week in San Francisco, and the next wave of startups that work to advance those first steps into new areas are capable of changing the way we work forever, to a better. It may be a rough ride with some wrong turns. But I'm fully convinced and confident that whats lurking in there will benefit us all. Welcome to the journey, it has just begun.

Globe photo by James Halliday

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/11/01/the_long_march_from_crowdsourcing_to_a_global_meri http://readwrite.com/2011/11/01/the_long_march_from_crowdsourcing_to_a_global_meri Analysis Tue, 01 Nov 2011 03:30:00 -0700 Bruno Haid What happens when the Recession Apocalypse has got you down? Get a couple of buddies together, call yourselves the Defenders of the Commonwealth and launch a $5 million Kickstarter campaign to promote the state of Kentucky in the first ever crowdfunded Super Bowl commercial.

The campaign, started by three advertising creatives, will recognize the state of Kentucky as the birthplace of the Happy Birthday song among other feel-good homages to the Bluegrass State.

Whit Hiler, who co-founded the effort with buddies Kent Carmichael and Griffin Vanmeter, says that so far Kentucky for Kentucky has raised $2,600. They have set the go-ahead funding level at $3.5 million. They hope to have that much by November 7, a few months before the famed football match.

They have a ways to go, but that has not diminished Hiler's enthusiasm. "We're going rogue with it," he jokes. "The idea would be to have millions of Kentuckians invested in this project. This is about shedding light to the world that Kentucky is awesome and it kicks ass."

Kentucky, like other states facing fiscal pressures, could use the tourism boost, too.

We'll be tracking this project, and if you feel like getting a T-shirt in exchange for a few greenbacks to the Kentucky cause - and another possible proof of Kickstarter's successful crowdfunding concept - you can head on over.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/09/08/kentucky_boys_kickstart_a_35_million_super_bowl_ad http://readwrite.com/2011/09/08/kentucky_boys_kickstart_a_35_million_super_bowl_ad Advertising Thu, 08 Sep 2011 08:30:00 -0700 Douglas Crets If you think our middle school science and math education is below par, now is your chance to do something about it. Today the magazine Popular Science joined forces with InnoCentive to announce a new competition to come up with a series of new curricula around a series of topics. Each winner will receive a purse of $5,000. Lesson plans need to include a hands on activity for students and should cost no more than $50 total in readily available materials per class.

The deadline is the end of October and there are already several hundred people hard at work. There are prizes in five different categories such as Biomimetic Design, Climate Change, Fuel Cells, Polymers and Big Data Analysis. Middle school Hadoop developers? It could be an emerging trend: now they just aren't all about using Facebook, but designing the next data interfaces for it.

InnoCentive has lots of other crowdsourced projects and problem solving challenges on their site than the PopSci challenge, it is worth checking out if you haven't heard of them before or read our article from several years ago here.

This is the week for contests. Over on our ReadWriteHack site we mention a contest being run by the US Defense Department for wannabe computer forensic examiners. And over on our Enterprise site, we wrote last week about how Intuit paid out a series of prizes for QuickBooks and Quicken App developers .

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/08/15/win_5k_to_redesign_a_new_middle_school_science_cur http://readwrite.com/2011/08/15/win_5k_to_redesign_a_new_middle_school_science_cur Contests Mon, 15 Aug 2011 02:25:04 -0700 David Strom Google Map Maker opened up to U.S. users today, allowing anyone to submit updates, revisions and additional information to the company's online mapping service. The tool was originally designed for users in other countries without access to the mapping resources we have stateside. Says Google, prior to the launch of Map Maker, only 15% of the world's population had detailed access to online maps of their neighborhoods, but now, citizen cartographers in 183 countries and regions have created maps of the places they live. Today, 30% of users people worldwide have access to online maps, thanks to Map Maker.

Given the extensive mapping services available here in the U.S., why would Google open up this tool here? Google is crowdsourcing corrections and additions, the company says, by allowing its users to add more detail about the places they know best. But there may be more to it than that.

With the Map Maker, Google says you can fix the name of local businesses or add improved descriptions. You can also add more information about an area, like bike lanes or the names of buildings on college campuses, for example. To prevent any high jinx from occurring, Google notes that it will review the user-created submissions before they go live.

While on the surface, the launch of Map Maker in the U.S. appears to just be another useful feature to differentiate Google's mapping service from its competitors, there may be some additional motives behind this launch.

One motive may have to do with the expansion of Google Places, the search company's Yelp-like business locator service. In April, Google merged its socially-infused local business recommendation service called Hotpot into Google Places, the larger business database which provides reviews and venue information. Now Google is crowdsourcing edits to that same database via this U.S. launch of Google Map Maker.

Building a Better Location Database, Thanks to You

One of the primary assets of companies involved in providing location-based services is their database of venues. On this front, Facebook is a tough Google competitor, with its own database of locations called Facebook Places. In September 2010, a company spokesperson said the goal for Facebook Places was to be the "central platform for location data" across the Web. And in February 2011, Facebook made some under-the-hood changes to the way it houses venues listed on its site, a move that enables the network to have an accurate, universally standardized database of locations.

Location-based check-in service Foursquare also has its own venue database, and, like Google will now as well, uses crowdsourcing to help keep that database accurate. In theory, select superusers on Foursquare's service are enlisted to clean up duplicate venues and make sure each pushpin is accurately placed. The job of crowdsourcing this cleanup is not going well in my local area - nearly every major venue has at least 2 or 3 clones, if not more. In fact, last I checked, my gym was listed four or five times!  (I'd love to hear more about your experience with this problem, or if you don't have one.) This may or may not be an across-the-board complaint, but it does highlight the challenges of creating a location database where users themselves are permitted to enter venues of their own, with no direct company oversight.

It should also be noted that another Google competitor, Microsoft's Bing, has also gone the crowdsourcing route to some extent, partnering with Open Street Map (OSM) back in August 2010, to make it available as an additional layer on top of Bing Maps. The company has donated aerial imagery to the Open Street Maps community too, and, in November, hired OSM founder Steve Coast to come work at Bing Maps.

To put it simply, today's announcement from Google has a deeper impact to the company's overall strategic initiatives than simply a case of "oh look, new tools!" Clean, accurate, robust, detailed and up-to-date maps and databases of locations will be key to growing any business that leverages location data in the future, which today includes a number of mobile services, and their online counterparts.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/04/19/google_map_maker_comes_to_the_US http://readwrite.com/2011/04/19/google_map_maker_comes_to_the_US Crowdsourcing Tue, 19 Apr 2011 01:23:49 -0700 Sarah Perez The National Institute of Standards and Technology is asking the public to help them identify a bunch of gear in their digital collection that their experts cannot figure out. As io9 put it, the NIST "doesn't just produce technical specifications for everything from wifi to voting machines - they also have a digital archive devoted to the study of early technology."

The mystery machines, which come from the NIST's collection of scientific instruments in Gaithersburg, Maryland, are mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

"We have some artifacts in our collection we want to identify, so we thought we could exhibit them online and ask for help," said NIST Digital Services Librarian Regina Avila. "It was fun to photograph them, but challenging. Some artifacts were broken, others had missing pieces. Some were heavy and others were fragile."

Currently, 137 artifacts are on the site, and hundreds more will be added in the coming months.

The unidentified objects come with some really stylish names. To wit:

Instrument with Eight Dials Set in Wooden Frame

Black Cylindrical Instrument with Small Round Window Set on Tripod

Metal Instrument in Wood Case

Photos from NIST Digital Archive | additional sources: PopSci

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/04/15/help_the_national_institute_of_standards_tech_id_m http://readwrite.com/2011/04/15/help_the_national_institute_of_standards_tech_id_m Crowdsourcing Fri, 15 Apr 2011 10:30:00 -0700 Curt Hopkins GLOBE at Night is aggregating public measurements of the night sky (or lack thereof) from March 22 through April 6 in the Northern Hemisphere and March 24 through April 6 in the Southern. This is the sixth year the group has used you all to map the encroaching light pollution in the world.

Using a web app that is provided online, participants are asked to attempt to identify certain constellations and, if they can, rate them against magnitude charts. The project tracks the increasing problem of disappearing darkness, which can interrupt the cycles of plant and animal life, eventually to a fatal degree.

As the administrators point out, the night sky is a disappearing resource.

"With half of the world's population now living in cities, many urban dwellers have never experienced the wonderment of pristinely dark skies and maybe never will. Light pollution is obscuring people's long-standing natural heritage to view stars."

Among the negative changes light pollution brings, GLOBE lists the following as examples.

• Disorientation of sea turtle hatchlings by beachfront lighting
• Nesting choices and breeding success of birds
• Behavioral and physiological changes in salamanders
• Disturbances of nocturnal animals
• Altered natural light regimes in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems

In addition to the effect on biological life and the psychological - some would say spiritual - effects of the absence of the stars, light pollution decreases the earth's ability to resolve hyrdocarbon pollution as well, as Wired points out in its coverage. Excess light destroys those chemicals that destroy hydrocarbons and which normally build up in the atmosphere each night.

Last year saw 17,805 participants tracking their night skies; 15,300 the year before; and 6,838 in 2008. They are hoping to at least hit 15,000 this year.

All the datasets from each year are available, to professionals and lay people alike.

Other sources: PopSci

]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/03/23/help_track_the_death_of_the_night_sky http://readwrite.com/2011/03/23/help_track_the_death_of_the_night_sky Crowdsourcing Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:00:00 -0700 Curt Hopkins