Crowdsourcing News & Articles

2012 will see further pushes in the way stores try to get us to buy stuff, but don't just be a passive consumer this year, expect appeals for you to fund or work on apps and games to become increasingly common.

CrowdEngineering has put a patent on crowdsourcing. As you may remember, CrowdEngineering provides a platform designed to fully integrate existing processes and applications with the benefits of technical crowdsourcing. This week they put a ring on it, so to speak, by securing a patent that covers its core technology for enterprise crowdsourcing, the foundation of its flagship CrowdForce platform.

Every year I get asked “What’s next for collaboration?” I did 10 predictions for 2011 and followed up last month in CMSWire on how well I did with those predictions. I was about 80% right (by my reckoning): let’s see if I can be more accurate this year. Some of my predictions for 2011 did not come true. Oracle did not acquire OpenText, but maybe that will happen this year, since there is a good relationship already.

This year, keeping some of my 2011 predictions in mind, I have 10 new predictions that cover a wide range of collaboration topics from community management to reinventing the supply chain. Don’t get your elves all in a twist, there will be plenty about technology. In this article I offer my first two predictions.

Social Forecasting is the aggregation of employee and/or expert knowledge and its conversion into quantitative business KPIs and forecasts. It is used for forecasting new product potential, sales figures, as well as strategic scenarios. This flavor of crowdsourcing with employees is being used by various corporations, which have embraced a simple insight: “Employees often know more about products, markets and competitors than you think”.

We are all overwhelmed with content on a daily basis. Our feeds blink in and out of our peripheral vision, our 7 communication streams ping and honk and shout for attention, our searches result in 600,000,000 results. How we prioritize this information stream and glean insight and relevance from the flood is an ongoing evolving process. The wisdom of the crowd is here to help.

Getting customer feedback into new products has always been a good idea.  Now Pleasanton, CA based Spigit, a self-described crowd innovation company, is making a game of that process with its new FaceOff application. By turning voting on brand directions into a game, the company looks to engage their customers while generating new ideas.

 We’ve definitely seen many uses for crowdsourcing. From designing to human intelligence tasks to collaboration, crowdsourcing has been a reliable method for getting things done on time and under budget, provided you’re engaging the right community. Recently, we learned about another way to employ crowdsourcing in a way that’s mutually beneficial for all parties -- usability testing.

At CrowdConf in San Francisco this week, crowdsourcing and social CRM came together. CrowdEngineering announced that its self-service platform, Crowd4Self, is now integrated with Amazon Mechanical Turk, the Amazon marketplace for work.

Last week, W3C’s Authoring Tool Accessibility Guideline Working Group released new working drafts of two documents focused on web development tools and accessibility. Today, W3C announced an agile track for developers and businesses to create Web technology within W3C's international community of experts. In other words -- diversity breeds innovation; anyone may apply.

As mobile platforms become more and more popular as tools for information sharing and social networking, businesses are also looking into the potentials of location-targeting in marketing and collaboration. Smartphones and tablet computers -- including the iPhone, iPad, Android devices and others -- can also take advantage of location-awareness, with which a new social networking application by BitFlx (news, site) lets users share videos that are time-bound and location-aware.

Hi Michelle --

We don’t know each other, but I’m working on a new idea. Through our internal collaboration system, I found that you may have expertise relevant to it based on your documents, posts and profile. I’d like to discuss with you what I’m working on, and what I need to help flesh out this concept.

Regards,
Hutch

Imagine getting a message like that. How would you respond?

If you were going to write a book about social technology, would you write it in isolation or would you use the wisdom of the crowds? Scott Klososky chose to crowdsource the content of his recent book, Enterprise Social Technology: Helping Organizations Harness the Power of Social Media, Social Networking and Social Relevance.

For the longest time, Google (news, site) has expressed disdain against black-hat search engine optimization methods. These include keyword-stuffing, redirects and all sorts of underhanded tactics. Recently, though, the spotlight has been pointed toward so-called content farms, which are essentially websites with large collections of articles that are supposedly of low-quality, and designed specifically to monetize on-page advertisements.

All the excitement about Quora these past few days has us curious -- could Quora be a model for an effective enterprise knowledge management tool?

Most of us understand the value of sharing information. But when the information belongs to others, we wonder “what’s the point?” Yet, as massive amounts of information abound, the art of content curation can help us provide resources to our audiences while positing ourselves as an authority. Here’s how.