Wisdom of Crowdsourcing (Social Media meets the Network Effect)

In my post “Web 2.0 Press Release an Oxymoron?” on the Fusion blog I questioned
the wisdom of a Web 2.0 (or social media) press release.

As I mentioned in that post, I don’t think that slapping Web
2.0 bells and whistles on aging metaphors is the right way forward. I would love to be proved wrong, and hear
about social media press release success stories.

Those in the press release distribution business (who often have to field questions like “Why PR?” and the like) have also been seeking to embrace Web 2.0 elements like RSS. This approach combines two aging metaphors
with the new. Which is all well and
good, however if you look carefully you will see that most online conversations
do not focus on the press release “news du jour,” at least not in the way that PR practitioners likely
intended. 

Similarly, when it comes to journalism, many in MSM are seeking to rescue their franchises by co-opting new media.

A year or two ago the L.A. Times famously tried to open its
editorial pages as a Wiki with disastrous results (as reported in the CNET piece “L.A. Times shuts reader-editorial Web site“).

Journalists are blogging in growing numbers, sometimes under
the banners of their publications and sometimes independently.

Publications are seeking to use bloggers as sources, and there
have been attempts to package and syndicate blog content as sort of a new age
wire service (see Marketing Vox post “Newspapers to Syndicate Blog Content.”)

Some have tried to leverage the boon in user generated
content, seeking to extend the eyes and ears of the publication by accepting images
from cell phones (see PDN Online . “AP Joins User-Generated Content Bandwagon“)

Although some if not many of these approaches could have
merit and could work, I think the better ideas are not just superficial
attempts to graft new media onto old but instead tap into the truly disruptive
nature of the read/write Web. 

Here is one particularly interesting example of a bold idea that might actually be possible and might actually work.

There has been much online discussion about the
blogosphere and other new technologies enabling an age of participatory,
citizen journalism. 

Open source efforts like Wikipedia and Linux have proven that people
can and will work together to build a quality product, gratis.

And it has been shown time and again that online markets
correctly guess the outcomes of things like elections, sports competitions,
etc. (see Smart Mobs ”
NYT on online prediction markets on political futures“)

So why not combine these ideas? Is it possible to build a better news story
by leveraging the reach of the masses, the inertia (and error correcting behavior) of an open source group effort, and the almost uncanny
wisdom of crowds?

I had in fact recently been contemplating this very
possibility when I in fact noted the NY Times article on Monday, “All the World’s A
Story,” by one of my favorite journalists, David Carr.

He writes:

“A new experiment wants to broaden the network to include readers and their sources. Assignment Zero (zero.newassignment.net/),
a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the
experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of
journalism at New York University,
intends to use not only the wisdom of the crowd, but their combined
reporting efforts – an approach that has come to be called
“crowdsourcing.”

The idea is to apply to journalism the same
open-source model of Web-enabled collaboration that produced the
operating system Linux, the Web browser Mozilla and the online
encyclopedia Wikipedia.”