Citysearch, a division of IAC, wants to build out Sidewalk.com as a local guide site, and instead of launching their own coding project is testing the crowdsourcing waters. Entrants get a shot at a $10K prize and (possibly) additional funding to realize the project. Here’s the outline of the contest:
The dust has settled after my back to back Web conferences in Austin: WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon South, and South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, and I thought I’d take a minute to compare the two. I’ll start by saying that any such comparison is beyond apples & oranges… the two conferences are quite different in scale, objective, and many other ways. Given that, here are a few areas of contrast:
I remember in the early days of the Web it wasn’t uncommon for a site to tell you that you could only view the site in a particular browser, or that if you didn’t have a specific resolution you might not see everything. Eventually, web designers figured out that rather than telling the user how to browse, they would design for the user and ensure the site rendered correctly in the major browsers and most common resolutions.
Ball State University, a member of the Indiana state university system, is further differentiating itself from its better-known siblings IU - Bloomington and Purdue by pouring money into new media:
Fast Company has a good article on the growing use of user-generated content to provide guidance on restaurants, hotels, and just about everything else. The article focuses on the challenges faced by various review sites in balancing freedom of expression against the need to curtail bogus reviews generated by competitors or the firm itself:
A Motley Fool post about Twitter reminded me, of all things, of an ancient WSJ article about the popularity of guayabera shirts. I dimly recall that the article spent a long time discussing the comfort and business acceptability of the guayabera, but then closed with a punchline that went something like, “That’s all fine, but when the boss is looking around the conference table for someone to downsize, do you want to be the guy in the guayabera shirt?” My paraphrased version in relation to this Twitter headline was, “That’s all fine, but do you want to be the guy Twittering when the boss is deciding who gets a pink slip?” In fact, though, the article makes a few good points about potential business value in Twitter.
The title of this post might sound like a Bill O’Reilly sound bite, but it’s not. As a long-time community guy I suppose I should have known what a “fisker” was before reading Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki. I didn’t. “Fisking” is responding to another individual’s email or forum post by quoting it extensively and responding to it line by line.
Although the Stanford Web Credibility Guidelines are a few years old now, they are still a great starting point for anyone trying to boost their web results - ecommerce orders, business inquiries, and so on. While some of their ten guidelines seem obvious - “Make it easy to contact you,” “Highlight the expertise behind your organization,” “Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site,” to name a few - we have all seen many, many sites that fail to take these simple but important steps. I think there is another credibility indicator that the Stanford researchers overlooked: #11. Rank at the top of search results.
Crowdsourcing has occasionally been an alternative to doing things the old-fashioned way by, say, paying an expert. While many indirect effects of crowdsourcing exist, there has been little direct impact on employees within a given organization. When Wikipedia let many thousands of users create its content, no professional writers or editors were displaced. Encyclopedia publishers didn’t all fire their staffs and start wikis. Travel reviews written by users haven’t put the big travel guides out of business, nor have those firms decided to cut staff and let travelers do all the work. An interesting post by Tom Foremski at ZDNet describes one of the first examples I have seen of one company cutting paid staff to let users do the work for free:
I’m a great believer in the power of communities to generate great information by crowdsourcing. I have to admit that I’ve been too busy to spend a lot of time at Sphinn, a sort of Digg for SEOs/Webmasters. When I have stopped by, I’ve invariably found some links to cool content. Now, longtime member of the SEO community pageoneresults (aka Edward Lewis) has published data which purports to show that some Sphinn members are sabotaging the community for their own benefit:
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