Crowdsourcing: Now (part 1)

In the December 2006 issue of Time magazine the annual Person of the Year article, in which a person is profiled which “has done the most to influence the events of the year” . In the previous decennia people like Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were all profiled. However in the 2006 issue the front cover featured a computer with a mirror, reflecting the reader, as display and bore the title “Person of the year: You”. Though criticized for not being a “real” person, the December 2006 issue did touch upon a new trend, which was subject of an earlier article in the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine.

Entitled the “Rise of Crowdsourcing” the Wired article described the rise of utilizing a large group of people on the Internet to perform a certain task. This task could range from creating videos or photography (also known as user-generated content) which can be viewed by others, or for instance the SETI@home project where the unused processing power of individuals computers is utilized in the search for extraterrestrial life.

The reason for Time in picking “you” as person of the year lied in the increasing power that lies with the online community instead of just one individual or company. It is this community that powers free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is collaboratively written by volunteers, and the video sharing site YouTube where users can upload, share and view video clips. On the community news site Digg, users can submit, rate, comment on and view news articles and as of March 7th 2007 Digg has one million registered users . The underlying notion of all these websites is that content (and thus the value), be it news, video, photos or encyclopedia entries, are not created by just one individual or company but by its users.

In the part two of this post we will look beyond user-generated content and inspect current trends in the innovation space.