The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser is a must read for anyone that makes use of personalized Internet services such as Facebook, Google and Amazon. While personalization is becoming a preference for many, Eli investigates the danger of living inside these bubbles and how they affect our relationships, identities, creativity and democracy.

The book focuses on the present as well as where we will be if we don’t become aware of what us happening with our data. Some compelling examples reveal how Google uses 57 signals to guess who you are and what you most likely to click on when using the search engine. Even if you are not logged on the search results will still be customizable. The effect of living in bubbles can be a major problem. While you may be fed information that is relevant to you, these results tend to leave out the outliers and not diversify your content intake.

Another company highlighted was Acxiom who new more about 11 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 than the U.S. government. Acxiom knows about 96% of American households and 500 million people worldwide. What they know includes family members, current and past addresses, how often credit card bills are paid, whether they own a pet, whether they are right or left handed and what kind of medications they use.

Imagine a scenario researching visiting a third world country and then applying for life insurance. Could the insurance company use that search results to increase your payments? Companies are developing technologies that will enable us to take a picture of someone and then search for pictures on the Internet to match up even if they are not tagged with your name. Imagine the possibilities.

These are just some of the few examples and put forward by Eli Pariser in his book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. Click Here to purchase the book on Amazon. For further information watch the TED talk below.

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This year I have mainly blogged about crowdsourcing as it was the research topic for my masters thesis which I have now completed. I thought it would be appropriate to write my last post for the year about crowdsourcing summarizing what I learnt. I conducted case studies on two crowdsourcing platform operators;  TopCoder and InnoCentive and these were my conclusions:

• Three important areas emerged
  • People
  • Processes
  • Technology
• Crowdsourcing has 3 role players
  • Client Organization
    • The organization wanting a problem solved
  • Platform Operator
    • A platform where the community and client organisation collaborate
  • Community
    • People that provide solutions to the client organisations problem
• The platform provides the foundation for crowdsouring. The platform operator facilitates the global communication (using technology) with the people (community members) in order to complete the process of crowdsourcing.
• The notion of opening up problems to a world outside the boundaries of an organisation on a global scale is still new and emerging
• As a  emerging concept, this is a radical shift away from traditional thinking, where it is assumed that the best talent and best ideas sit within the walls of an organization
• People play an integral part in crowdsourcing and the correct and justifiable incentive will have to be provided in order to build a community
• Organizations need to be careful of exploitation by not providing the appropriate incentives and think that community members will solve problems without being appropriately compensated
• There are two types of benefits for community members
  • Direct
    • Financial compensation
    • Public recognition
  • Indirect
    • Keep metrics to measure performance amongst community members
    • Break a project into smaller modules, which allows community members the opportunity to work on parts of a project that they want to
    • A platform to meet like-minded individuals
    • Networking

To read more about my findings an in depth case studies click here.

Crowdsourcing is a process that involves different role players in order for the task to be completed successfully. The process has three role players; the client organization with the problem, the platform operator and the community who provides the solutions to the problem.

The Crowdsourcing Process

1. The process is started when a client organization recognizes that it has a problem that could be solved by the process of crowdsourcing.
2. The client organization approaches a platform operator who then distributes the problem via an open call to its community members.
3. The platform operators community then provides solutions to the problem
4. The solutions are then evaluated by the the client organization and the best solution (s) selected.
5. The winner(s) are then provided with a reward.
6. The final step would be the transfer of intellectual property if applicable.

An example demonstrating this crowdsourcing process was a challenge started by SunNight Solar (client organization) and InnoCentive (platform operator):

1. SunNight Solar required an affordable solar-powered device to prevent or limit the spread of malaria (problem).
2. InnoCentive, a platform operator with over 160,000 members distributed the problem via an open call to its community members
3. The InnoCentive community submitted 18 solutions to the problem
4. These solutions were evaluated and the winning solution was selected
5. The winner was awarded $40,000 for the solution
6. The IP was then transferred from the winning solver to SunNight Solar

To read more about the winning solution and how it works read more on the InnoCentive Blog.

Here is a video explaining what is crowdsourcing?:

South African singer Verity Price found it hard to get a recording contract in South Africa. As featured on Carte Blanche, music producer Peter Lacey explained that the market for English speaking music in South Africa is less than 500 000 people and this includes international artists. A successful record in South Africa is considered selling 5 000 units. Besides releasing an album there is the added tasks of getting radio stations to play the music and getting retailers to sell the album.

With a mamoth task of convining record companies to give her a recording contract, Vertity took on a novel approach to getting her album funded. A website along with a blog was setup and people were asked to purchase her album before she recorded it. The online campaign included getting bloggers to write about it, MySpace and Facebook were also used to garner support with all these websites linking back to her website.

An added incentive for those who bought the album was that they got to vote which songs she recorded and their names were listed on her website. They also recieved a limited addition album. Verity managed to sell 2 000 albums before it was released and it covered all her costs. The album was released without any debt associated with it and it contributed nearly R30 000 to charity. What Verity managed to do is known as crowfunding. Crowdfunding is one of the models of crowdsourcing as described in Jeff Howe’s book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Wikipedia defines crowdfunding as:

collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns.

In the case of Verity the crowd replaced the need for a record company to provide funding. Crowdfunding reduces the reliance on funding institutions to provide capital. Verity also introduced a way for the crowd to participate by voting which songs appeared on the album. The crowd were not just given the final product they had an opportunity to participate in the creation process.

The MXit Blackberry application allows users to send messages at no cost over the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) network (Vodacom users). The application can be downloaded from the Blackberry app store or just point your Blackberry’s browser to MXit’s wap site www.mxit.com/wap.

Some the features include:

• Changing of language within the app
• Mood and presence is saved and is not lost when log out
• The chat screen displays the time
• A template farewell message is can be sent to the contacts you are chatting to when you log out
• SMS referrals (Your service provider will charge you standard SMS rates)

A crowdsourcing platform allows a organization to collaborate with a community to provide solutions to a project. When organizations decide on crowdsourcing a project they can either attempt to attract the crowd themselves, creating their own platform in the process, or make use of an existing crowdsourcing platform with an established community.

The main difference is that an exisiting platorm will have an established community. Opting to create your own platform will require investment in attracting and establishing a community. Examples of crowdsourcing platforms include:

• InnoCentive

A platform with a community of over 200,000 members. InnCentive posts a wide range of problems from organizations in  areas such as engineering, computer science, chemistry, life sciences and business

• TopCoder

A platform with a community of over 247, 000 members. TopCoder posts computer programming problems from organizations in the form of competitions. The community are then asked to design, develop and test the software developed in the competitions. More information can be found here.

• Amazon Mechanical Turk

• A platform with a community of over 100, 000 members. Allows anybody to post tasks that need to be completed like writing product descriptions or finding broken links on a website.

Deciding on whether to create your own platform or use an existing platform depends on the circumstance. Although creating your own platform will require advertising in attracting people to be apart of the community it also means you will have exclusive use of the community. Pepsi did this with a campaign that allowed people to design the look of a Pepsi can. The winners received a $10,000 prize with their design been featured on Pepsi cans. This was also seen as a marketing campaign by Pepsi.

Opting to make use of existing platform means that you have an established community so the chances of reaching a wide audience are likely. These platforms have experience in running successful crowdsourcing projects so there is no experimenting on trying to make the project succeed.

Below is a list of great books covering the topic of crowdsourcing. Click on the images for further info.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

We-Think

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice)

MXit Lifestyle have released a new instant messenger client for the PC. This is in addition to its existing plugin for Pidgin. MXit explains thats it has been specifically designed for the Windows environment making it faster and more efficient. Some of the features include:

• Finding contacts in a search bar
• Saving of chats (already a feature in Pidgin)
• Emoticon support
• Drag and drop file sharing
• Facebook status integration
• multiMX support
• Audible alerts

MXit Evo for PC can be downloaded here.