I heard a speaker today vehemently making a point about how much the printing press impacted us as human beings because it made knowledge available to the common man. Although agree, it pales in comparison with what the Internet is doing for humanity. I was frankly a bit surprised that he chose to make a point of Gutenberg instead of DARPA. The Internet has done more than just provide heretofore unheard of quantities of knowledge at the press of a button, and it has also provided a transport vehicle for nearly free communications around the globe. There is one other benefit the Web has brought us and that is the ability to marshal the joint talents and labor of the Internet herd to get tasks accomplished at a price, speed, and accuracy level that has not been possible until now. We call this capability crowdsourcing of course. In the cosmic scheme of what is important to man, I am pretty sure the Internet will prove out to be dimensionally above the printing press. Now might be a good time to expand on the hierarchy of crowdsourcing because it is being used more and more on the Internet and many people still do not recognize the signs.
Voluntary vs. Involuntary… There are sites that ask people to volunteer their time to help their fellow man. Wikipedia is a good example of this, as is Google asking volunteers to build help videos for youtube.com. Google is the master of asking the herd to do work on their behalf as a way to get things done without cost to them. In fact, they are also a good example of crossing over the line to the Involuntary. They build an image indexing game that some people fail to recognize as a scheme to index images by leveraging the brain power of the people playing the game.
Social vs. Commercial – Yahoo Answers is a great example of a site where the community of users is crowdsourced to provide the underlying product – which is advice. Just ask any question and the community at large will give you an answer. On the commercial side of this same model is Name This. This site pays you to offer your advice to companies trying to develop brand and company names. I have a friend that has struck gold a few times when his names were accepted. I think he is up to $90 in income at this point.
Rewarded vs. Unrewarded – Innocentive is a site that allows companies to post problems that they need solved with a specific bounty that can be earned if someone has a solution. Some of these problems have $1,000 bounties and there is on that is offering a cool $1 million. On the flip side is Dell Ideastorm, and mystarbucksidea, whose sole purpose is to provide a place for customers to give product advice with no reward other than maybe getting these large organizations to improve their products. In other words, free market resource leveraging the herd.
Crowdsourcing is a powerful undertow on the Internet. We are seeing just the tip of what will become a very large iceberg. As time goes on, more and more organizations will clue into the fact that with over 1.5 billion people on the Internet (and growing) there are many people available to get things done. It is a mistake to ignore this concept – especially in a tough economic market when getting work done on the cheap can pay big dividends. So the next time you are tempted to point to the printing press as some monumental event in history (which it was,) try using the Internet and its many aspects instead. When we look back decades from now, we will surely know that the Web dwarfed the printing press as an enabler, if nothing else than because it allowed for the crowdsourcing of millions of people with very little effort. Not even Stalin was able to pull that off and survive it.