The internet is a large place. Billions of users access and create sites and pages every day. This crowd of the internet is a massive one, and many are designing and utilizing ways to take advantage of the crowd of humanity.
Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and crowdcreation are all fairly recent frontiers on the horizon of technology. We can see the effectiveness of such ideas through the success of sites such as KickStarter, the AmazingTurk, and a legion of wikis. As far as the future goes, it doesn’t look like the crowd will be slowing down anytime soon.
In the Beginning Their Was Wiki
Wikipedia. The site is both loved and hated, useful and distracting, collaborative and competitive. Wikipedia is a place where all of human knowledge is written, edited, and re-drafted by somewhat anonymous individuals the world over. On Wikipedia, information is created, destroyed, and refined by millions of contributors.
You know what the crazy thing is? It works.
Yes, not all information is perfect, but the resource that Wikipedia has become equates into billions of page-views each year. In fact, Wikipedia has become the fifth most popular site on the internet. By leveraging the creative and intellectual prowess of individuals the world over, Wikipedia and its somewhat less popular predecessors revealed to the world the power of the crowd.
The Amazing Turk
Wikipedia is neither the start nor the ending point of using the crowd of humanity to complete projects and begin new ones. Amazon’s Amazing Turk is a service that pays miniscule amounts of money to individuals who are willing to complete mundane, non-complicated tasks. Thousands of companies have used Amazon’s crowdsourced workforce for research, data collection, and more.
The individuals who work on the Amazing Turk site often do so just for fun. The limited amount of money that can be made is somewhat limiting, but does allow for large scale projects to be completed in a speed never before seen. Crowdsourced workforces are popping up elsewhere as well.
A KickStart and Forward
Want to get a project funded? Want to get a project funded by thousands of prospective customers? KickStarter is to financing projects what Wikipedia is to user curated information. With just a bit of creative content and video, individuals and businesses are able to bring projects to light with the power of millions and billions of internet users.
The crowd of the internet can be used to create and edit content, finish immense projects quickly, and even fund new creations. With just a bit of interest and ingenuity, companies can leverage the crowd of humanity to reach new height of creativity and productivity.