crowdsourcing

Sometimes Google takes a break from its mission of organizing all the world's information and decides to embark upon an artsy project that encapsulates...organizing all the world's information.

Late on Tuesday, the search giant posted an entry to the Official Google Blog announcing the creation of "Life In A Day," a film project that solicits video submissions from YouTube users around the world--the criteria is that they must capture some kind of moment filmed on July 24.

It's legit. "Touching The Void" director Kevin Macdonald will edit "the most compelling footage&… Read more

NASA's plans to visit the moon may be shelved for the time being, but that doesn't mean that you can't take a trip to the lunar surface. And you won't even need to get fitted for a space suit.

NASA and the Citizen Science Alliance on Tuesday announced Moon Zoo, a project to essentially crowdsource the examination of a large set of high-resolution images of the moon in a bid to answer some of the most burning scientific questions about the big rock orbiting us every 27.3 days.

Moon Zoo users will view new images … Read more

After the devastating January earthquake in Haiti, which left hundreds of thousands dead, many more injured, and more than a million homeless, the country's infrastructure lay in ruins. But because Haiti's cell phone network inexplicably survived, text messaging quickly became a way for people to put out pleas for assistance.

Not long after the disaster, the country's largest cell network provider set up the shortcode 4636, allowing Haitians to text a call for help. But with thousands of texts flooding the system, and a need for many of them to be translated into English, relief workers needed … Read more

Want to change the world but only have 99 cents? Armchair Revolutionary is here to help.

Set to launch into beta on Tuesday, Armchair Revolutionary is a Web-based social activism platform designed to harness large-scale crowdsourcing and the boom in social gaming in a bid to support a wide variety of science and technology ventures that could benefit the world at large.

Started by the founders of The Hollywood Hill, said to be the largest social change membership organization in the entertainment-industry, Armchair Revolutionary is meant to bring people's interest in helping support worthwhile causes and the iTunes-era simplicity … Read more

Most online retailers keep a safe distance from their customers (unless they're asking for credit card information). ModCloth, an e-retailer of vintage women's fashion founded in 2002, is deviating from this model by creating a community of fashionistas included in almost every part of the company.

Without the customer-company separation, ModCloth is more like a best friend who gives you fashion advice, shares her favorite recipes, and joins your book club. Wait, we're still talking about a clothing store, right?

Right. In October 2009, Modcloth launched its "Be the Buyer" program, an initiative that lets visitors vote on clothing samples. If an item gets enough votes, ModCloth will sell it. Sound familiar? Threadless was founded on a similarly democratic principle, but Modcloth is the first to add crowdsourcing as a supplement to a traditional storefront.

ModCloth takes its customers' fashion advice to improve its buying decisions, but it's also about building community. Customers leave comments on clothing samples and vote, but can also share their views with friends via Facebook or Twitter. It results in a group of people who may not know each other, but share in common an interest in fashion and a desire to talk about it.

These fashionistas are a part of a community more complex than garments, though. ModCloth's blog, ModLife, covers everything from fashion to recipes, and provides "cool links" on the Web. There's even a link to a Flickr account where customers upload photos of their favorite ModCloth outfits.

On March 8, ModCloth announced its reading contest, in which users who share the title of the book they're reading on the social-networking site GoodReads enter for a chance to a win a copy of ModCloth's book of the month. It's unclear whether ModCloth has officially partnered with GoodRead, but the partnership represents a significant shift in online retailing.

Online shops generally have a narrow frame of thought, assuming their customers came to them for only their products. But Web 2.0 is about community, and ModCloth was right in assuming that its shoppers have more in common than clothing.

I caught up with ModCloth founders Eric and Susan Koger via e-mail to find out more about the community they've built. … Read more

For Wired UK’s “Work Smarter” issue (just released), I had the pleasure to speak with John Winsor, co-founder and CEO of Victors & Spoils (V&S), the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. You can find a shortened article in the Wired UK magazine. Here’s the interview in full length.

Q: V&S launched a few months ago. How is it going so far? How many clients do you have, and can you share some of the work that you are doing?

It's going really well. We're working with a … Read more

It's always good to be the first, and while crowdsourcing, the trend, may have jumped the shark, a fully crowdsourced creative agency is a bold creative experiment and still news. Two Crispin Porter + Bogusky alums, John Winsor and Evan Fry, together with Claudia Batten, the founder of Microsoft-acquired video game advertising shop Massive, have launched Victors & Spoils (V&S), "the world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principle."

V&S says it will "provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world's … Read more

Workers stuck in the world's largest refugee camp are being given a chance to wield a mouse and keyboard as tools for digging their way out of poverty, and in the process, are helping out a series of small American companies looking to be more profitable.

The workers, many of whom have been in the refugee camp in Kenya for years, are toiling at new jobs--in which they do short, simple projects over the Internet--provided to them by an innovative San Francisco nonprofit serving as an intermediary between companies needing an efficient way to get small tasks done and … Read more

If you've ever been driving down the highway and looked at the Google Maps application on an iPhone to see what traffic is like ahead, you may have wondered where the data behind the green, yellow, and red lines indicating real-time vehicle flow come from.

In fact, the data are coming from people just like you: users of smartphones with GPS who, by the very act of driving down the highway, are feeding back information about how fast they're going to Google, which in turn is sending it back to users of its mobile map apps.

Which means, … Read more