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.

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.

Here's where the gooseGrade WordPress plugin comes in. Extending gooseGrade's philosophy of harnessing the power of the Internet to help catch and correct these issues, this plugin closes the loop on WordPress stand-alone blogs, allowing submitted corrections to be seen from within the WordPress dashboard. The corrections list is very Wikipedia-like, showing the original block of text on the left, and the corrected block on the right. One more click and the edit is committed to the post and you are done. Brilliant!

If you have a hosted WordPress blog, and you weren't a newspaper writer or editor in a previous life, we recommend you check out the gooseGrade plugin. And keep in mind that gooseGrade has a code snippet you can drop in to your site's HTML if you use something other than WP, like Blogger or TypePad.

Earlier, Borders Australia and Random House held a contest to find twenty-eight writers who would be able to write the bulk of the book. The chapters they produce will need to be less than 750 words so, obviously, this book will be a little lighter than Patterson's other novels.

Once complete, Airborne will be released electronically, one chapter at a time, starting on March 20th. Later, a print edition will be published, but only as a prize of sorts for the participants in the competition - it will not be mass produced.

Collaborative Writing is So Very Web 2.0

The roots of the collaborative writing movement can be found in many web startups, including those like Novlet, Potrayl, Ficlets, Unblokt, Protagonize, and others we profiled here. A popular activity for creative writers, these communities offer various takes on how a co-written story should be developed, some focused more on "choose your own adventure"-style stories while others focus more on linear narratives.

Although the James Patterson novel is more of a marketing campaign than anything else - and, in this case, the "crowd" is actually a hand-picked selection of aspiring writers - it's still interesting to see such a widely-read writer embracing the co-writing trend. While those passionate about the subject may say this particular effort doesn't qualify since it isn't truly written by "the crowd," it's events like this that take the general idea behind the trend and cross it over to where it can make a mark on the minds of the mainstream.

What remains to be seen at this point is whether a crowdsourced, co-written novel can actually be any good.

Those interested in following the progress of AirBorne can do so on Facebook, Twitter, and via RSS.