Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is one of the Mideast leaders who isn't reacting to the social media pointed in his direction with a knee-jerk ban. Instead, he is rolling his Facebook pageout as a platform for crowdsourcing his cabinet.
Dr. Fayyad dismissed his old cabinet on February 14, in the wake of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. He is obliged to appoint a new cabinet in less than six weeks, so he's reached out to the young people to ask them to be a part of the process.
The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have been dubbed by some to be "Wiki Revolutions" because "just as people can self-organize to contribute to Wikipedia...they can participate in social change and coalesce into revolutionary movements as never before." Now, it seems that wikis may not only be behind toppling governments, but also stripping plagiarizing government officials of their educational titles.
This week, German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has said he would remove the "Dr" from his name while a plagiarism investigation of his PhD took place. Where did this investigation originate? Wikia, the for-profit wiki project started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Have you ever tried asking a question on Facebook and wondered if anyone ever saw it? The problem with asking all of your friends on Facebook a question through a status update is that you never know who is going to see it. Between Facebook's algorithms, the mass of updates and the simple fact that not everyone lurks on Facebook 24 hours a day, you never know who your question will reach.
Enter Cloudy, an iPhone app that "lets you quickly and easily ask groups of friends for their opinions."
If you're a TV actor, you have the Emmy Awards. If you're a journalist, you have the Pulitzer Prize. But if you're a citizen reporter, what do you have? Nothing, until now.
CNN announced today that it was launching the CNN iReport Awards "to honor the best examples of participatory journalism in 2010."
What do a chipped tooth, a world record and the relocation of a popular café in downtown Oakland all have in common? Each needed money to achieve a goal and, rather than going the usual routes of taking out loans or operating on credit, each found funding through crowd funding.
At a panel at Social Media Week in San Francisco today, The Next Web's Hermione Way led a discussion on the new, age-old form of financing that's become uniquely possible with the advent of social media.
After Pluto was demoted from planet to minor planet, the keening began. Now, astronomers Duncan Forbes and Pavel Kroupa have decided to crowdsource the definition of a galaxy.
Forbes, from Australia, and Kroupa, from Germany, have published a paper that introduces the problem of definition when it comes to galaxies, which may be more of a question even than what is a planet?
The British painter and video artist "Stanza," has spent a couple of decades traveling around the world. Every place he'd stop, he'd grab audio tape (then digital recordings) of the sounds of that place. In 2000, he started posting sound-maps online and in 2004 he made the database available. Now, Soundcities is an extensive, open-source sound and mapping site that users can freely take from and contribute to. There are even on-site mixing decks to allow anyone with a computer to remix the world.
I first came across the site only today, when an old friend, the perennial exile activist and writer Sokari Ekine, tweeted a blog post on the site, which she'd been using as an antidote to living in Florida. (My words, not hers.)
Has "snowmageddon" 2010 got you down? Did that snowplow make a wall of snow, ice and grime as tall as your SUV and you don't have a shovel? Or are you just sick of sitting around the house?
Ushahidi, the crowdmapping tool originally developed to track elections in Kenya, has created two websites for both New York City and Boston to help with the clean-up, dig out stuck vehicles, and assist with impromptu snowball fights.
What if you were given incredible powers but had such a limited imagination that you only used them to pollute the internet with spam? That's what's happening to the powerful distributed labor marketplace of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, where requesters pay small sums of money for people around the world to perform small tasks that only a human can do. You can use Mechanical Turk to do incredible things - but it turns out that most people don't. Many just use it to hire an army of spammers.
A new study by NYU academics Professor Panos Ipeirotis, Dahn Tamir and Priya Kanth studied all the new Mechanical Turk requester accounts that have been created over the last two months and found that more than 40% of their requests were for the workers to commit acts of spam. The team used Mechanical Turk itself to evaluate the tasks submitted, but they had to take extra steps after their own requests for work came back filled with spammy, random input from workers who didn't care. The whole situation is a tragic loss of opportunity - because there are some really fantastic things you can use this service for.
AOL-owned MapQuest has undergone a number of changes over the last year, including a major overhaul. Today, it has launched a new initiative that may help endear the once top dog in online mapping to much of the geolocation community - a U.S. site based on crowdsourced mapping effort OpenStreetMaps.
MapQuest has already introduced similiar sites across Europe and Asia, but this site - open.mapquest.com - brings OSM data to the U.S.
