Crowdsourcing

When I first watched this video I thought of the Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy.  In it, there is a race of people that are tying to figure out the answer to "life, the universe, and everything."  The build a massive computer and wait millions of years, only to find the answer is 42.  Distraught, they now have to find the question.  Here's the scene from the movie:

The book continues and the reader is ultimately shown that this ancient race builds a supercomputer to find the question - Earth, and all of the people on it, make up that computer.  Did Douglass Adams foreshadow crowdsourcing in 1978 when he first wrote the Hitchhiker's Guide?

Crowdsourcing is one of the greatest innovations of Web 2.0.  Finally having the technology that allows millions of people to make incremental changes to a product will only make that product better (in the long run).  Wikipedia is a prime example.  Allowing anyone to change an article ensures that it is complete and accurate.  A science textbook can't change with current theories and a history book can't include newly unearthed primary documents - but Wikipedia can.  Of course vandalism is an issue, but negative changes are only there for a few minutes before someone else notices and changes them.  Mistakes in a printed work are there forever.

Then there is the video, which showed how Luis von Ahn saw a problem - specifically the poor image labeling on the web - and devised a way to improve it.  Instead of building a team of people to go through each of the millions of pictures on the web, he built a game that allowed everyone to do it.  He was also clever enough to do it in a way that made people want to play.  He appealed to their competitive nature and completed a task that would have taken a dozen people just as many years to complete.

Crowdsourcing is the wave of the future and I'm excited to see how it can be leveraged to make sweeping changes to the world.