StanleyWong.org » Search Physics http://stanleywong.org Musings from the Interactive Adman Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:06:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Crowdsourcing is Really Self-Organization http://stanleywong.org/2007/03/23/crowdsourcing-is-really-self-organization/ http://stanleywong.org/2007/03/23/crowdsourcing-is-really-self-organization/#comments Fri, 23 Mar 2007 02:29:23 +0000 SWong http://stanleywong.org/2007/03/23/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.

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