Crowd sourcing works, here’s some examples

by Robert Scoble on June 28, 2009

Ever use a crowd to learn something? I have. Here’s some of my favorite ones:

1. What Netbook would you recommend?

2. Examples of “now” marketing.

3. Teaching me about microformats.

4. Top apps to load on your new iPhone 3GS.

5. Favorite Twitter app for iPhone.

6. A bunch of people’s favorite web sites.

7. Tools people use to build 2010 websites.

8. Hundreds of people teach me about “leadership.”

9. What apps/services people think should be included in a list of 2010 web ones.

10. What to do if you see FriendFeed spam.

11. What to use instead of PowerPoint to give presentations.

12. What should CIOs consider about the 2010 web?

13. Interesting groups of Twitterers.

14. Should you use Disqus, Intense Debate, BackType on your blog’s commenting system?

15. What kind of mountain bike do you recommend for $1000-$1,500?

There are plenty of other examples too, but most of these have very good answers and are participated in by dozens if not hundreds of people each.

Have you found other examples of where crowds were used to answer questions and where the answers that came back are better than what you can find elsewhere?

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  • Isn't open source an example or crowd sourcing?

    Multiple people writing code, many testing and others writing manuals etc!
  • WOW! u R on the right track! Friendfeed is so powerful and the way ur using it for crowdsourcing is innovative!
  • Christopher Coulter
    I will leave heart surgery to the doctors. Could a crowd fly your plane to London?

    A mish-mash of inside-baseballish likes and dislikes, that ain't wisdom, that's a unscientific and wholly unrepresentative limited-scope survey, best of luck with that.
  • But you're a rare example for crowd sourcing because you got a big community around you. ;)
  • P
    Have you ever tried getting advice when you are a nobody, rather than a Scoble?
    Try it with an account with no followers, then see what you think about the usefulness of crowdsourcing for normal people.
  • Aardvark, a new Facebook app, can help there.
  • Hi Robert! I have a good example for you, Timo and Paul (because I don't have a big community around me:)

    I used Smartsourcing (Smartsheet + Mechanical Turk) to help me find a list of small business/technology reporters' Twitter aliases at the 50 major metro daily papers. Here's the blog post from yesterday and the list is embedded inside.

    http://brentfrei.typepad.com/blog/2009/06/why-s...

    In this scenario, I did pay the Turkers for the information, but it saved me hours and hours of time and only cost $68!

    Thanks for the post,
    Maria
  • As an alternative to PowerPoint, you should also consider using an overhead projector. Old fashioned, but also dynamic in that you can draw/write on the slides as you go.
  • Christopher Coulter
    Crowd scouring is just big egos (with lots of followers) using other people to do their legwork for them, lazy self-appointed aristocracy bidding the "help" to perform simple tasks, that they cannot be bothered to trifle with, as they are above such rudimentary stuff as research.

    Honestly, all those questions could be answered with 5 to 10 minutes of research, and a few with a single Google Search. Try asking really complicated questions, that need direct answers and not opinions, verified by real experiments, and see how well it works then.
  • Facebook User
    While many questions can be answered with 5 to 10 minutes of research, there still exist some time consuming tasks that simply cannot be done that way. For example, if your boss asked for a list of all the insurance agents in New York, would you really spend the 3+ days doing the research?

    Or conversely, if you were that boss and you are paying the interns by the hour, why wouldn't you want to save some money by having the crowd do it?

    At the same time, the people who do engage in the actual tasks are neither slaves nor grunts. Here is an example of a study done on this:

    http://datadiscoverers.com/research/?p=3
  • Isn't Aardvark an example of crowdsourcing?
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