Slashdot Mirror

Yes, some places like Slashdot have managed to build a public gathering spot and sell some ads around it, but it's quite another to get this crowd to do real, coordinated work.

One of the "Tricks" to the Crowdsourcing phenomenon is to provide a way for users to create value without feeling like they are working. Slashdot has done that to the extent that you have created content (your posting) questioning whether anyone has done this. Tom Sawyer indeed.

Check out the Carnegie Mellon projects, The ESP Game, Peekaboom, and Phetch for more examples where users are providing valuable services FOR FREE while playing a game. Similar to how you and I are creating value for free in this forum with our witty banter. It feels rewarding to post a comment. And it creates a valuable end product for Slashdot.

One "crowdsourced" concept that I find to be totally unethical is the archival of student papers. Force students to submit papers to your service, in the name of plagiarism-checking, and then hold them FOREVER, and build a database of content so that you can use other people's Intellectual Property. The McLean trial starts around January 23rd. Hopefully Slashdot will be covering it.

Yes, some places like Slashdot have managed to build a public gathering spot and sell some ads around it, but it's quite another to get this crowd to do real, coordinated work.

One of the "Tricks" to the Crowdsourcing phenomenon is to provide a way for users to create value without feeling like they are working. Slashdot has done that to the extent that you have created content (your posting) questioning whether anyone has done this. Tom Sawyer indeed.

Check out the Carnegie Mellon projects, The ESP Game, Peekaboom, and Phetch for more examples where users are providing valuable services FOR FREE while playing a game. Similar to how you and I are creating value for free in this forum with our witty banter. It feels rewarding to post a comment. And it creates a valuable end product for Slashdot.

One "crowdsourced" concept that I find to be totally unethical is the archival of student papers. Force students to submit papers to your service, in the name of plagiarism-checking, and then hold them FOREVER, and build a database of content so that you can use other people's Intellectual Property. The McLean trial starts around January 23rd. Hopefully Slashdot will be covering it.

Personally, I like to play Peekaboom, also by van Ahn and others at Carnegie Mellon.

Sounds like what they're doing at Peekaboom and The ESP Game, harnessing humans to solve problems that are difficult for computers.
Here's an nice video on the subject.

Or better yet, just go ahead and play The ESP Game and Peekaboom.

I'm pretty sure I've seen some university project identical to this some time (1 year ?) ago. So it's definitely been done before. Although google does make a perfect (or at least a lot more suited) maintainer for such a project.

It's basically a licensed version of the work by Luis von Ahn, a grad student (and now professor) at Carnegie Mellon. It's pretty similar to his Peekaboom game.

If you watch the video of the creator, he talks a lot about the science behind it. He also points out Peekaboom, which takes ESP a step further. Now two players are actually identifying what part of the image is a man, or a car, etc. It's pretty fascinating, especially as it might apply to test data for image recognition research.
J

Beware, it may be addictive. ;)

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/research.html has the papers and http://www.peekaboom.org/ is the game implementation.