Hire nobody, hire everybody.

May 19th, discussing lessons learned from researching prior art and copyright infractions, Would you hire a couple professionals or every single passionate amateur?

Next time you need to dig through a massive amount of publicly-available information to find prior art, research copyrights or patent filings, would you hire a) a team of experts or b) an intern and spend $1,000 on Mechanical Turk (or, more possibly, c) both)?

Or perhaps you’d choose a better strategy, d) dump all the information on your website and enlist tens of thousands of volunteers using a public, fun, fast, scalable system that creates a feedback-driven narrative?

That’s what the Guardian newspaper in the UK recently did to crowdsource their investigation into the recent scandal over MPs’ expenses (link via Ethan Bauley).

And people say the web is all just noisy chatter; done right, the unorganized mass of people can influence institutions with more power than ever before.

Professional journalism isn’t dead, and it never will be; it’s just a vastly different game. Ignore the new world at your peril.

Posted June 23rd, 2009 in Perspective. Tags: crowdsource, journalism, media.

Hello, I'm Taylor Davidson.

I'm an early-stage VC and a photographer. If you liked this post, please subscribe to this blog. For more like this, check out the archives, and follow me on Twitter @tdavidson.

http://www.sambr.com/ sambr

Fascinating story about how the Guardian was able to sort through all that data. Now, the question is, how do you harness the power of the web masses when you don't have the current event attention that the Guardian was able to utilize? Not all of us have front page news scandals driving attention to our data sorting.
http://www.sambr.com/ sambr

Fascinating story about how the Guardian was able to sort through all that data. Now, the question is, how do you harness the power of the web masses when you don't have the current event attention that the Guardian was able to utilize? Not all of us have front page news scandals driving attention to our data sorting.
http://www.sambr.com/ sambr

Fascinating story about how the Guardian was able to sort through all that data. Now, the question is, how do you harness the power of the web masses when you don't have the current event attention that the Guardian was able to utilize? Not all of us have front page news scandals driving attention to our data sorting.
http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/ Taylor Davidson

Set expectations accordingly, provide the right platform to create the
right interactions for the people that will help, promote their help,
and give something back to them. It's less about maximising total
attention, but maximising the attention from the “addressable market”
of people that will help.
http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/ Taylor Davidson

Set expectations accordingly, provide the right platform to create the
right interactions for the people that will help, promote their help,
and give something back to them. It's less about maximising total
attention, but maximising the attention from the “addressable market”
of people that will help.
http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/ Taylor Davidson

Set expectations accordingly, provide the right platform to create the right interactions for the people that will help, promote their help, and give something back to them. It's less about maximising total attention and action, but maximising the attention and action from the “addressable market” of people that will help.

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