Researchers have created a 21st century global mood ring with data mining
Hedonometer.org draws on tweets and other sources of textual sentiment to gauge population-level happiness. Read more »
How startup Alegion aims to humanize crowdsourcing
photo: Flickr user Christian Scholz
Crowdsourcing is a great idea in theory, but it hasn’t really lived up to its potential, says Alegion CEO Nathaniel Gates. He thinks with some fundamental tweaks, Alegion can change all that for the better. Read more »
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Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
Crowd labor is outsourced information work that can be provisioned automatically. It’s ideally, inexpensive, on demand, and elastic. Platforms providing such services are on the rise in 2012, promising customers lower labor costs in the short term and higher-quality output in the long term. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Beyond social: the crowd-based enterprise
The next big thing in collaboration is crowds, not social. We still struggle with silos of collaboration in most enterprises today. By adding social tools we have accelerated communication but not necessarily increased the overall level of collaboration and action in the enterprise. That’s where crowds ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
The future of work is already here. It is just already distributed, one might say. The freelance economy, microtasking, mobile workers, coworking spaces, crowdsourcing: All of these point to how work is increasingly shifting from the twentieth-century model of Taylorism (think scientific management applied to labor processes such as assembly-line production and fixed workplaces) to a more flexible, hyperspecialized and connected workforce. This report examines the new world of work, from the devices and software services we use to the growing role of social media, the importance of a group-centric mentality and how the roles of employees, managers and organizations are evolving. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Exclusive: CrowdControl launches, brings AI to crowdsourcing
A new startup called CrowdControl is launching today, and it aims to bring order to the world of crowdsourcing by using artificial intelligence to judge workers’ accuracy. Think Amazon Mechanical Turk, only with a quality control mechanism in place to help ensure jobs get done right. Read more »
Crowdsourcing from the Developing World
Last month saw the launch of CrowdFlower, an interesting venture that applies Dolores Labs’ Labor-as-a-Service platform to the non-profit “micro employment” foundation Samasource. We’ve previously covered web-based labor and outsourcing services — notably Shorttask and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — that match-make workers and tasks, and I’ve […] Read more »
