March 23, 2007

Crowdsourcing is Really Self-Organization

Just came across this very interesting article on “Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads are Better Than One.” The article talks about examples of harnessing human behaviors and interactions into three distinct areas:

  1. Creation (Ex. Open Source Software, Wikipedia)
  2. Prediction (Ex. Pickspal.com, Stockpickr, American Idol)
  3. Organization (Ex. Google’s PageRank, Digg.com, DMOZ)

The concept of crowdsourcing is really interesting in that it is really self-organization where seemingly chaotic conditions goes through a phase transition to bring about some sort of order. You can find self-organization everywhere from diverse subjects such as nature (Ex. Ants), business (Ex. market bubbles), physics (Ex. equilibrium thermodynamics), chemistry (Ex. chemical reactions), Entertainment (Ex. American Idol, Billboard Music Charts), and of course the Web.

Value is created when one can harness the power to create structure from unstructured chaos. In Physics, this phenomena can be described in mathematics.  This is very much the problem that our team at Search Physics have been trying to tackle when it comes to organizing the information on the Web. Stay tuned for more.

* Filed by SWong at 2:29 am under Marketing, Search Physics, Web 2.0
* 1 Comment

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One Response to “Crowdsourcing is Really Self-Organization”

  1. Genex Business Solutions
    July 12th, 2009 | 2:32 pm

    Crowdsourcing is a new thing, and a type of outsourcing. Technology has enabled us to do it now, use a million brains to experience results not experienced before.

    I agree with you guys, its about organizing, specially in crowdsourcing, if your plan is not OK, success chances are very low. We can use some 3rd party websites to do so, like 99designs.com to engage large number of designers to do the same job and we get the chance to pick the work we like the best.

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