What Crowdsourcing Is and How Digital Media Has Created It

Crowdsourcing is a popular term on the web these days. Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe you haven’t. It comes from the old saying, “A problem shared is a problem halved.” Crowdsourcing can be thought of as mass collaboration, sometimes towards the achievement of a goal. The way it works is you open a problem to the public, and the hope is that through the advice of many others, you solve the problem.

Here’s an example: in Ontario, mining company Goldcorp was struggling financially and unable to find gold on its land. When the new CEO came in, he placed all of Goldcorp’s geological data online and asked for help in locating the gold in exchange for $500,000 in prize money. They eventually received submissions from all over the world and ended up finding $3 billion in gold.

It works because you draw upon a wider pool of knowledge. The very idea is evident in so many other practices. For example, for a new product you conduct market research with hundreds of consumers instead of the ten people who made the product. This will ensure more accurate feedback. However, we must be careful because we could be left with many inaccurate ideas.

How what does this have to do with digital media? Well if crowdsourcing involves mass collaboration, what’s the best way to reach the masses? That’s right, you guessed it. Social Media. It is through social media that “millions of people can aggregate their talent and expertise.”

Through social media, we are able to send a message that says “Hey! I have a problem! If you have any idea, please help me.” We see this in a mini form with Yahoo! Answers or in a large form with Wikipedia. These are all forms of crowdsourcing. However, sometimes crowdsourcing can be much more temporary, like the Goldcorp example, or Lady Gaga who frequently enlists social media tohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif encourage crowdsourcing for a charity.

The internet and web has allowed us to connect and interact with another, and crowdsourcing puts that ability to good use. Why would I help you? Maybe there’s sometimes incentives involve (like the $500,000) or maybe I have expertise in your problem and wouldn’t mind sharing it because it makes me feel useful, or the complete non-selfish route would be we help out of the kindness of our hearts .

Crowdsourcing.

Here's the article in which this post is based on: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8788780.stm