According to a report released this week, U.S. consumers are willing "co-creators", a fact that many companies have yet to take advantage of.

Of those consumers willing to co-create, more than half were even interested in co-creation "regardless of the product, service, or brand involved." Of course, it might be better to get those who are actually interested in and willing to purchase your products involved rather than those who aren't, as "consumers with knowledge of or a genuine interest in a product would naturally be inclined toward making that product even better."

A major factor involved in consumers' willingness to participate in online co-creation, of course, was time involvement. Also seemingly obvious is the fact that "incentives drive interest", with 63% saying that their "participating is dependent upon receiving some form of compensation".

Why simply create a product and offer it to consumers when you can take advantage of the two-way street that is the Internet and find out, before putting in too much time and effort, exactly what it is they want in the first place?

Note: there is a new writer coming on board, which I will announce in a separate post on Saturday.

10 Classic Josh Posts

Below I've listed 10 of Josh's posts that I've particularly enjoyed over the past 15 months. This is a completely subjective list. I nearly called it 'Top 10 Josh Posts', as a kind of inside joke that I think he would appreciate :-)

• Internet Killed The Television Star: Reviews of Joost, Babelgum, Zattoo, and More -- Josh's first post on RWW, dated 6 June '07. I believe it was after reading this post, which Josh wrote as a guest writer, that I thought: "I need to hire this guy".
• Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One -- Josh's second post! Crowdsourcing has been one of his favorite topics, see also IdeaScale - Crowdsourcing R&D (more links to his crowdsourcing posts inside that).
• Rolling Your Own Online Office
• Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students
• Top 10 Facebook Apps: Work; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Play; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Media; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Utility; Top 10 Facebook Apps: Extension -- Josh has written a lot of outstanding posts about Facebook, and this 5-part series on top Facebook Apps is still a must-read.
• Is Facebook Worth the Hype?
• The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics? -- online politics has been another strong topic for Josh, as this post demonstrates. I always looked forward to reading his take on how the Web was becoming a part of the political process.
• A Big List of Sites That Teach You How To Do Stuff -- still ranks as one of our most successful posts ever, proving once and for all that the Web loves lists.
• Beacon Saga Comes to an End: Facebook Adds Global Opt-Out, Apologizes -- a great overview of the Beacon saga at Facebook.
• There is No Web 3.0, There is No Web 2.0 - There is Just the Web -- 'nuff said!

All the best Josh in your future endeavours. Stay in touch and we hope to see you regularly in the RWW comments ;-)

With the Transportation Security Administration's new app, My TSA, you no longer have to worry.

In addition to wait-time information, the app provides a comprehensive list of what you can and cannot bring with you on the plane, as well as a general travel guide to answer questions about acceptable identification or other guidelines.

While the app seems like its main shiny feature is wait-times, we wonder if crowdsourcing the content is the best way to go. Of course, it is the cheapest, but is there no other way to get this information?

The app is one of 18 government-created apps that are being featured as of last week in the new government app store on USA.gov. The wait times are also available for other platforms as a mobile website at www.tsa.gov/mobile.

The Accountability Project is pretty simple: you can upload and view videos, or track down Republican candidate events. There's no voting or comments; it's essentially a platform for videos to go viral. So far, uploads mostly consist of tepid footage of conservatives criticizing Democrats. But when compared to other political crowdsourcing projects, the site stands out as one of the more potentially disruptive ideas in this midterm election.

Crowdsourcing in politics has become ubiquitous over the last several years, particularly as candidates and agencies have figured out how to use social media well. But this year is the first major election since President Obama so famously harnessed those social tools in his 2008 election bid. Online videos have already played a significant role (one of the most famous involving a Democratic Representative).

Roy Temple, a Washington, D.C.-based Democratic political consultant, says that usually, "When parties or candidates seek activist opinions (like the current GOP effort to crowdsource policy priorities), there is a certain level of cynicism that their opinion will count."

The Accountability Project, he continues, "taps into the belief by party activists that politicians of the opposite party say one thing in front of the press, and quite another when they think no one is really listening. However, all activists can imagine a scenario where what they capture on video could really make a difference in a campaign.

"The projects asks activists to undertake an activity that almost all of them can appreciate the value of, which increases the likelihood that they will take such action. And it offers them a way to be involved that they might not have otherwise thought was possible or meaningful."

That last point may be the most critical part of the DNC's project. In a paper published last month on crowdsourcing [PDF], a researcher at the London School of Economics wrote that, "The needs, aspirations, motivations and incentives of the crowd to participate in the initiative must remain the most important consideration [...] The practitioners must understand the crowd motivation and align their goals according to it." (Emphasis ours.)

That might sound like common sense, but considering the number of projects asking the crowd to do the equivalent of ranking policy initiatives, too many political strategists seem to be confusing the crowd's interests with what will genuinely motivate it.

In other words, if you want to create an effective crowdsourcing project and the crowd is hungry for political blood, then give them the equivalent of an elephant gun.

Photo by Scott Liddell

In order to help make Twitter more accessible to this growing global user-base, the company has just announced the Twitter Translation Center, an effort to crowdsource translations so that Twitter can quickly launch in additional languages.

New languages added to the Translation Center, in addition to those already offered, include Indonesian, Russian and Turkish. Those are the languages into which Twitter will be translated next, and the company says there are more to come.

Crowdsourced Translations

Crowdsourcing translations isn't new. Facebook is now available in over 70 languages, for example, thanks in part to the efforts of over 300,000 users who helped translate the site. And Twitter says it's been using volunteer translators since October 2009.

Crowdsourcing translation works by taking a word or phrase - such as "hashtag" or "Privacy Policy" - and asking for input and feedback on translations. The community then agrees on the best possible translation. You can sign up to help translate Twitter - its mobile and websites, its apps, its help and business centers.

Not everything in the world may be suitable to crowdsourcing, though. I ate a container of soy yogurt this morning and while nine people have said it was healthy, three said it was not. Why? I have no idea. Do I care about their nutritional assessments of my meals? If they are making the same stabs in the dark as I am to rate other peoples' food on a scale of one to ten - I'm not sure I do care about other peoples' uninformed opinions. So far I don't think this app is as good as a number of alternatives.

I don't think processed grains, diet soda or most meat is very healthy. You might think my black coffee is less healthy than tea. Are they? I honestly don't know, but I just clicked to rate 50 peoples' habits this morning on the Eatery app.

The company says that it will be able to discover other additional and more useful information in aggregate. That sounds promising and it wouldn't be the first instance in which a particular data point has far less value than loads of them together.

A "veggie sandwich with blue doritos and water" - how healthy is that? On a scale of one to ten? I guess that depends on what kind of bread it is, how many condiments were put on it and why not lose the Doritos if you're worried about it?

"While straight-forward crowdsourcing may not seem like the best source of healthiness of a meal, here's the true power of what's possible: We're already doing interesting things behind the scenes; and as we accumulate more data, our algorithms get smarter," Raskin says. "We crowdsource with people who have similar eating goals, which quickly increases accuracy. We also know whether any one person rates well or poorly. That means, if I rate erratically or poorly, your vote counts much more than me, since you're good at rating. When big data meets crowdsourcing you get something much more powerful than simple votes."

The Eatery strives to make food tracking easy and simple, but I think too much is lost along the way. Hopefully that will change over time, though.

The bits and pieces submitted from around the world will then be collected and built into a feature-length documentary film that will debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Anyone whose footage makes it into the film will be credited as a co-director and could also be one of 20 people selected to attend the premier.

This project has enormous potential to create something truly amazing, in my opinion. YouTube is by far the largest resource for sharing and viewing video on the Web, and big name directors Scott and Macdonald should have no problem creating a compelling story from the plethora of submissions they are likely to receive.

Other projects in the past have leveraged the YouTube community to create collaborative media projects. Composer Eric Whitacre assembled a virtual "YouTube Choir" by taking submissions from users singing the various voices of a few of his choral pieces. The success of YouTube's "Life in a Day" project could be big win for crowdsourcing and the real-time Web, placing it front-and-center in the spotlight and encouraging its further evolution as a platform for multimedia collaboration.

Crowdsourcing

Maybe the most interesting aspect of ShovelWatch, however, is that it plans to engage citizen reporters to track how the stimulus money will be spent in their local communities. Essentially, the site plans to crowdsource the coverage of the stimulus plan.

Besides its focus on content from The Takeaway, ProPublica, and WNYC, ShovelWatch also tracks stories about the Stimulus Bill on other news sites and features a nice list of resources in its sidebar.

With Recovery.gov, the government has obviously created its own site for tracking the stimulus bill, but Recovery.gov doesn't currently feature as much in-depth information as ShovelWatch (the 'announcements on the site haven't been updated since the middle of last week) and its focus is more on providing a high-level overview and not on tracking local developments.

Map the World

OpenStreetMap is what would result if Wikipedia and Google Maps made a baby. The open-source, wiki-based mapping project is leveraging crowdsourcing to create highly detailed, highly accurate maps of the world. The easiest way to get involved is to locate your community on the map and start adding items like parks, businesses, streets, landmarks and other objects to the map. Adding items is as simple as editing Wikipedia articles (which is really easy, if you haven't tried it).

Do you know of a hiking trail in your area that you can't find on OpenStreetMap? If you want to create an accurate representation of that trail, you can take a GPS device out with you on your next hike and capture the exact coordinates as you walk. Then simply hook up your GPS tracks-compatible device to your computer and upload it to OpenStreetMap.

Curate the News

Do you know how to find good journalism and want to share a curated list of high-quality stories with the rest of the world? NewsTrust, a growing community of over 15,000 consumers, journalists and educators provides a platform for users to rate and share news stories based on "facts, fairness, context and other core journalistic principles." So stop yelling at your TV when you don't agree with Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann and help the community by curating the news.

Use Social Media, Provide Rich Data

One of the best and easiest ways to participate in crowdsourcing is to simply use social media and share information on the Internet. By sharing your thoughts on Twitter, which will be come infinitely more intelligent with the launch of annotations, you can contribute to the fire hose of real-time data that researchers use every day to check the pulse of the world. Similarly, participating on services like Yelp help people crowdsource restaurant reviews. How else would I have known where to find a clam chowder bread bowl on the east side of San Francisco?

The real power lies in the data beneath the surface of various forms of social media. As mentioned above, Twitter annotations will create rich metadata from the billions of messages sent each day, but other services like Flickr have loads of metadata included with each photo. Photo data can not only include information about who took the photo, when and where, but also information about the camera, the lens, the shutter speed and lots of other photography-related metadata. Using this data, mashups can and have been made that creatively integrate Flickr photos to reveal fascinating information.

Start Your Own Project

If these projects don't float your crowdsourcing boat, create your own! If you want to help raise money for charity, Crowdrise is a great platform to get your efforts off the ground. Founded by actor Edward Norton, Crowdrise lets users create projects, share them on social networks, collect donations and send those donations off to charities. "Charities get the cash, the world is a better place, and everyone likes you more," the site says.

If that's not up your alley, try checking out one of several lists of crowdsourcing projects out there to participate in. There is an excellent list containing hundreds of examples up on the shared workspace platform PBworks where you're sure to find something to your liking. If you still want to try your hand creating your own project, check out Wikipedia's lists of recent projects for inspiration.

Photo by Flickr user Ian Ransley.

Last week's update to Google Maps introduced new ways to report errors for Google Maps users, so Google is clearly thinking about using a crowdsourcing approach to mapping for Google Maps. Google also announced that it now includes data from a number of US government organizations like the Forest Service and the US Geological Survey in its maps.

In the US, the Census Bureau creates a fairly accurate base map, and this data is available freely and represents the core data set for the OpenStreetMap project. With Map Maker, Google also offers an easy-to-use mapping product that even non-geographers can use to create and edit maps and which Google has already employed to let its users create maps for countries where no accurate maps existed until now.

While the new maps that were launched last week also include new errors, the overall detail of the maps has clearly increased and now even includes data for the boundaries of land parcels in some municipalities.

Why?

The question, of course, is why Google plans to make its own maps now. For one, chances are that Google is currently paying Tele Atlas a lot of money for using its maps. Mapping services are notoriously protective of how their data can be used, which is one of the reasons Apple can't offer turn-by-turn directions in the built-in mapping application on the iPhone, for example. Google probably wants to be free to do whatever it wants with its maps without having to worry about licensing issues.

By providing its own maps and an API for others to use these maps, Google could potentially become a major competitor to Tele Atlas and Navteq now, and if Google continues to make these maps easily available to developers without cumbersome licensing restrictions, it could bring radical change to the mapping business.

"Advertisers from all over the world will drop their briefs at holotof and we will sent them our ideas in return. They will choose a winner, who will get the cash award."

Of course, dropping your briefs is liable to get you in trouble some places... but in Holotof it is a chance to get creative people competing for your business. I like the idea and it seems a good way for advertising creatives to get work - especially for young or inexperienced creatives, who are trying to build a reputation in their industry.

Holotof is very similar to the current wave of jobs websites, such as oDesk - which R/WW mentioned in our review of the Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad. oDesk describes itself as an "on demand global workforce" and the idea is to be a marketplace for technical talent - as with Holotof, individuals essentially compete to land a contracting job. oDesk also provides web-based tools to manage remote teams, which has been a little controversial because it includes monitoring and click tracking software. Incidentally the controversy has been neatly turned into a positive by oDesk, even to the point of oDesk users waxing poetic about it:

"Each 20 minutes, a screenshot appears,
of the desktop for the guy I just hired.
At the end of my day, I can view on a page,
the events of his day that transpired.

But oDesk knows that there’s more to manage,
and throws some treats in the mix,
a vertical bar beside the photo,
counting all his mouse clicks!"

But I would imagine Holotof doesn't need to go to those lengths, as advertising creativity is not really a thing you can measure by mouse clicks!!

Anyway, Holotof guarantees its clients get at least 10 bids/ideas for their advertising briefs. Their business model is that clients pay for usage of the system - rather than a set monthly fee or a commission.

It's unclear at this stage how much business has flowed through Holotof, but I think the idea itself is promising and we'll increasingly see this kind of use of web technology in the global workforce. Speaking as a New Zealander, I can see huge benefits to both kiwi workers and businesses in using such a system to get work outside our tiny country.

Given the extensive mapping services available here in the U.S., why would Google open up this tool here? Google is crowdsourcing corrections and additions, the company says, by allowing its users to add more detail about the places they know best. But there may be more to it than that.

With the Map Maker, Google says you can fix the name of local businesses or add improved descriptions. You can also add more information about an area, like bike lanes or the names of buildings on college campuses, for example. To prevent any high jinx from occurring, Google notes that it will review the user-created submissions before they go live.

While on the surface, the launch of Map Maker in the U.S. appears to just be another useful feature to differentiate Google's mapping service from its competitors, there may be some additional motives behind this launch.

One motive may have to do with the expansion of Google Places, the search company's Yelp-like business locator service. In April, Google merged its socially-infused local business recommendation service called Hotpot into Google Places, the larger business database which provides reviews and venue information. Now Google is crowdsourcing edits to that same database via this U.S. launch of Google Map Maker.

Building a Better Location Database, Thanks to You

One of the primary assets of companies involved in providing location-based services is their database of venues. On this front, Facebook is a tough Google competitor, with its own database of locations called Facebook Places. In September 2010, a company spokesperson said the goal for Facebook Places was to be the "central platform for location data" across the Web. And in February 2011, Facebook made some under-the-hood changes to the way it houses venues listed on its site, a move that enables the network to have an accurate, universally standardized database of locations.

Location-based check-in service Foursquare also has its own venue database, and, like Google will now as well, uses crowdsourcing to help keep that database accurate. In theory, select superusers on Foursquare's service are enlisted to clean up duplicate venues and make sure each pushpin is accurately placed. The job of crowdsourcing this cleanup is not going well in my local area - nearly every major venue has at least 2 or 3 clones, if not more. In fact, last I checked, my gym was listed four or five times!  (I'd love to hear more about your experience with this problem, or if you don't have one.) This may or may not be an across-the-board complaint, but it does highlight the challenges of creating a location database where users themselves are permitted to enter venues of their own, with no direct company oversight.

It should also be noted that another Google competitor, Microsoft's Bing, has also gone the crowdsourcing route to some extent, partnering with Open Street Map (OSM) back in August 2010, to make it available as an additional layer on top of Bing Maps. The company has donated aerial imagery to the Open Street Maps community too, and, in November, hired OSM founder Steve Coast to come work at Bing Maps.

To put it simply, today's announcement from Google has a deeper impact to the company's overall strategic initiatives than simply a case of "oh look, new tools!" Clean, accurate, robust, detailed and up-to-date maps and databases of locations will be key to growing any business that leverages location data in the future, which today includes a number of mobile services, and their online counterparts.

Companies have been trying different ways to use crowdsourcing even before the word was first used in 2006. Last year saw the rise of it as a marketing tool, with some spectacular failures. Two memorable examples were Kraft, which was ridiculed when it changed the name of one of its products, and Toyota, which was criticized for a disturbingly off-color video.

In the last four years, crowdsourcing has been credited with saving lives, redefining the news and graphic design industries, and helping startups take on industry giants, along with literally hundreds of other examples.

There's one recent example of a company that used crowdsourcing not as a way to solve an individual problem, or to create a funny marketing video, but instead to try to understand how the crowd itself actually thinks.

In March, Nokia launched the Design by Community blog where it asked site visitors to help design a theoretical mobile devise. It's been a three-month-long, seven-step process where the crowd analyzed everything from the device's size and shape, to materials, to the operating system. At each step, blog visitors voted and commented - and commented and commented. Along with the voting and discussion of specs, the blog posted interviews with Nokia designers and insights into the creative process that goes into building a "real" phone.

In the end, more than 74,000 votes were cast. The name for the phone ("Nokia U") was created and picked by the blog's readers; in-house designers are expected to release a final mockup of the device soon.

Have the blog's visitors designed a dream phone? Probably not. Nokia has said since the beginning that it wasn't planning on actually making the phone. And using crowdsourcing to design products certainly isn't new.

The final device may end up being be an afterthought for the company. Voters were presumably the kind of customers who put a lot of thought into purchasing a mobile device. And since the set of sliders available to choose features for the "U" were pretty basic (above), it's not surprising so many of them turned to the comments section. Nokia wasn't just looking for an end-product or a checklist of desired features - it crowdsourced a process, a transparent decision making process.

Nokia ostensibly crowdsourced a mobile device, but the crowd gave Nokia much more than that.

Photo by Svilen Milev.

Crowdsourcing the measurement of environmental data could make it possible to create a real-time map of current ozone levels, for example. Through the Citypulse platform, the Green Watch project wants to make this data available for free. Citypulse was developed by the members of Citu, a group of French university labs, startups and government organizations.

How Do You Convince People to Wear These?

Of course, in order to turn this project into a commercial success, the developers would first have to persuade users to buy these devices for completely altruistic reasons. The prototype is also rather bulky. Also, as wrist watches are slowly being displaced by mobile phones, the developers will have to give users a good reason to wear a watch again. Air quality sensors, after all, don't work very well in trouser pockets.

Disclosure: The author met with the Green Watch team during a lunch that was sponsored by Cap Digital and Invest in France.

The crowdsourced computing initiative which those behind the Australia bid have put together will leverage personal computer power in lieu of extremely expensive petaflop supercomputers.

Computerworld Australia describes the crowdsourcing project.

"The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), along with iVEC, the company running the $80 million high performance computing Pawsey Centre at CSIRO in Western Australia, are set to launch a 'citizen science' application this year based on the open source Nereus V Cloud computing technology developed at Oxford University. The application, dubbed "theskynet" by Australian researchers, would grant anyone not affiliated with the global telescope project access to the datasets formed out of the array's work."

By 2013, when it is fully up and running, the application should allow the Pawsey Centre to engage in petaflop computing. It will also make it the third-fastest supercomputer in the world, as well as possbily the largest cloud computing networks on the globe.

According to PopSci, the SKA will consist of 3,000 radio dishes, "spread as far as 2,000 miles in every direction from a central core, offering a full 1,000,000 square meters (that's one square kilometer) of collection surface."

There have been crowdsourcing projects already to help crunch the massive data that comes through various astronomical projects, most famously, the Seti@Home project, which began in 1999. Seti@Home is a radio telescope project to listen for signals that might come from intelligent life. It continues to this day.

Distributing computing and storage needs between institutional and personal computers is not a one-way street. In addition to saving money, saving heat and energy (using already-running computers), it will also provide datasets from the array to both scientists and members of the public willing to run the app on their rigs.

Australian radio telescope photo by Amanda Stater