etailology

Crowdsourcing is the process of taking a large (and typically mundane) task and outsourcing it to a large number of relatively unknown freelancers. The Amazon Mechanical Turk is perhaps the best example of a crowdsourcing platform, per se, but when agencies pull photos from Flickr, or when they use videos from YouTube in their ads, or when CNN asks people are use I-Report, they are all crowdsourcing. Ultimately, the idea behind crowdsourcing is a cornerstone of the “Web 2.0 concept” — that none of us is as smart or productive as all of us — and is a recognition of the power and utility of collaboration over computing. This concept has also started to leak into terrestrial occupations in the form of Google’s Quality Rating workforce and JetBlue’s virtual call centers.