Crowdsourcing seems to the buzz these days, with LG crowdsourcing a cellphone design off crowdsourcing website crowdspring and starbucks receiving more than 17,000 coffee ideas of the web from their crowdsourcing platform mystarbucksidea.com. However, as with all new trends there are detractors and with crowdsourcing the number of detractors seems to be growing each day.

Previously I blogged about the wide spectrum of crowdsourcing , from the low end and mundane on Amazons Mechanical Turk, to the high end and niche Crowdspring. However, when a detractor to the term includes wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, then it’s time to study this a bit more in depth. So what is the ugly side of crowdsourcing and what does it strike a nerve with Jimmy Wales…and just about every designer I know.

Social media and sites like twitter have done fantastically well to enable to arab uprising or finding bone marrow donors. However, a group of people decided to use social media to answer some fundamentally important question , or rather just one very important question…who missed call me?

The web site (very aptly named) whocallsme.com allows user to post up missed calls from numbers they don’t recognize and people with similar calls usually try to respond. The response rate is pretty good although it mostly focuses on calls from credit agencies (quite obvious once you think about it)

The recent events in the UK while tragic have unveiled some new uses for crowdsourcing. Some time ago people used Google Wave (now called Apache Wave) to help find a criminal murder suspect, which was amazing news if you ask me, but it still didn’t save Google Wave. Now however, the guys over at a website called Zavilia had a brilliant idea of using crowdsourcing to solve the London rioting problem, the premise was simple, users would upload photos of the looters and rioters and those photos would then be posted online.  Each rioter would be labled with an alphabet, and finally other users could check out the pictures and begin identifying anyone they knew…brilliant solution.  Personally, I can’t imagine solving this problem without crowdsourcing, and it just goes to show that in the future we will solve problems together via collaboration on a massive scale rather than a few geniuses leading the way.

The guys over at zavilia have shutdown their website claiming:

The development of Zavilia: Identify UK Rioters has been temporarily paused due to a decrease in traffic and in user interactions. However, we fully intend to continue development at some point in the near future.

Amazing.

So you heard about Crowdsourcing from a TED talk you just watched online, and now you’re wondering what Crowdsourcing is. Well here’s the lowdown, Crowdsourcing is a phenomena where ultra rich companies rely on many lowly underpaid serfs to gather data, process it and then produce a result where the ultra rich companies can then use to make them richer…well in not so many words of course, but obviously I’m joking.

Jokes aside, Crowdsourcing is a pretty cool thing, it’s getting the wisdom of the crowd in your decision making process and relying on the fact that many people working together can produce much better results one single person or organization can. Think of crowdsourcing as brainstorming with an unlimited number of people, and where anyone can join (and leave) the group providing you the influx (and reflux) of ideas necessary to produce truly lateral thinking.

Working for a Multinational company means I have colleagues from all over the globe, some of whom I’ve developed a friendly relationship with, friendly enough to ‘friend’ them on facebook. Today I received the tragic news of the Oslo bombings not from CNN or BBC, not even from the Google news, but over a facebook status update from a colleague of mine in Norway. The sad news of such an atrocity was heart-wrenching, but in the midst of this I decided to do a small study to see how twitter was reporting the news as opposed to the usual mainstream internet news companies.

So going online I searched twitter for Norway and saw the very first tweet on the list, a condolence message from BO himself: