The Growth of Crowdsourcing

James Cridland


I learned a new word this week: Micro-volunteering. The idea is simple enough. Next time you're stuck in a traffic jam, stuck sitting in your dentist's waiting room, standing around during that 25-minute wait for a table at your favorite restaurant, or just plain bored, open up your iPhone or your Blackberry and spend a little time volunteering online. YOu can put your time that might otherwise be wasted to good use by performing small tasks for non-profit companies over the Internet.

That's just one new take on crowdsourcing. The idea fo crowdsourcing has been around for a while. Wikipedia is the poster child for crowdsourcing. They've build their free online encyclopedia with the help of volunteers (the crowd) who write their articles for free. Wikipedia has been around since 2001. It wasn't until 2006 that someone came up with a word for what they were doing: Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing then.

In the past few weeks I've seen crowdsourcing applied to a number of topics and problems: from helping the Republicans form a new political agenda to studying honey bees in California.

If Web 2.0 is about using the Internet collaborative and allowing Internet users to create content, crowdsourcing is fast becoming a driving force. It may take over journalism and the news industry, and it is becoming both a business model and a management tool for entrepreneurs.

Crowdsourcing is here to stay.

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