Crowdsourcing, the Wisdom of Crowds, Social Media, and a New Section of the Site

With Wired magazine wondering if the Web is dead, Facebook launching Places for a new era (they hope) in geolocation, and the interest in projects such as Pepsi Refresh, Chase Community Giving, and the Knight News Challenge a new section of the site seems in order.

If you've been following us for a while, you may have noticed that there are two main focuses to the site:

1. Community development and nonprofits (that's what I do with my non-technical time).
2. Technologies such as mashups, Facebook, mobile computing, Drupal, Mac OS X, iOS, and FileMaker (those are the topics I write about in my books).

Crowdsourcing brings those two strands of thought together, so there's now a section on this site under Community & Roundtable for crowdsourcing links and articles.

According to Wikipedia, it was Jeff Howe who coined the term in an article for Wired in June 2006. He wrote, "It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing." Large numbers of people -- particularly large numbers of people communicating over the Internet -- can focus on problems in order to find a solution. That wisdom of crowds has recently been applied to the evaluation of causes and projects (see Pepsi Refresh,  Chase Community Giving, and Knight News Challenge)

If the concept is new to you, here are three of the major references that you can catch up with:

• • Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations by Clay Shirky
• • Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe
• • The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki