Crowdsourcing involves obtaining work, information, or opinions from a large group of people who submit their data via the Internet, social media, and smartphone apps. People involved in crowdsourcing sometimes work as paid freelancers, while others perform small jobs voluntarily. Moreover, it is changing methods of labor on the Internet as “well-established crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo dip into people’s pockets, crowdsourcing taps into their brains. Experts say that turning to the masses can even yield sharper answers than other methods.” Also, while reading the article “Crowdsourcing to Get Ideas and Perhaps Save Money,” talks about the importance of crowdsourcing and how it has replaced focus groups to get data-driven results. Chris Hicken, president of UserTesting, states, “It’s faster and a lot cheaper. Innovation is going so fast that we need faster answers.” It was quite difficult and required planning when looking back on how we retained data from a specific subgroup. Nonetheless, with these new methods, individuals are one touch away from the vast environment of the Internet. Furthermore, another interesting article from this week’s required reading was “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” An interesting point that I took was the aspect of how even huge companies like P&G are using crowdsourcing to make better predictions to improve their consumer-focusing brands, genuinely evoking the importance of this tool. Additionally, Amazons take on this tool creating their own (Amazon Mechanical Turk), which gets in the topic of ghost workers in which people are hardly identifiable and “perform tasks computers are generally lousy at—identifying items in a photograph, skimming real estate documents to find identifying information, writing short product descriptions, transcribing podcasts.” This has generated a lot of talks on employee labor exploitation. Nevertheless, it has provided another sense of labor and a way to earn money for others on the Internet.
Oct 04
Recent Comments