“Homicide Watch DC” sounds like a cop drama, and to be honest it’s got the makings of a police procedural (especially for those of us familiar with the 5th season of The Wire). Instead Homicide Watch is a crowdfunded, crowdsourced reporting project, covering every homicide in the District of Colombia.

This claim is so bold as to almost be suspect. More than a hundred people are murdered in the US capital every year. That’s a huge number of stories, requiring an awful lot of information.

This information is partly official reports and court documents, but much of it comes from the crowd. Using social media and the help of the friends, families and neighbors of victims (and suspects), Homicide Watch puts together a lucid portrait of every homicide.

A database for the dead

Homicide Watch isn’t organized like a typical newspaper. Instead, the site is more like a database or wiki. Each victim is assigned their own page, where information related to their case is collated. This includes, crucially, a memorial and comments section where the community can contribute to the database and remember the dead.

The site’s popularity is evident from the $40,000 it recently raised in a Kickstarter campaign. This means at least for now, it has enough money to carry on (before the campaign they came dangerously close to disappearing).

Homicide Watch definitely contributes to homicide investigations, but it would be naive to hope for Hollywood results. Homicide Watch won’t be premiering on CBS anytime soon, although considering how glamorous CSI managed to make laboratory work, I wouldn’t put it past them. In fact, the website isn’t really about fighting crime (that’s for professionals, and Batman), but more about commenting on it, remembering it and making it accessible to the public.

A new beat for journalism

What makes Homicide Watch significant (aside from its motives, which are unquestionable) is what it might mean for journalism. Editor Laura Amico has described Homicide Watch as data-driven beat reporting built on a framework. This model – gathering data from the crowd into a database and then using it to construct ongoing journalism – is important for two distinct reasons.

First, the idea could be far-reaching in terms of applicability. Amico has suggested applying the approach to other issues, such as medical journalism. If Homicide Watch turns out to be an enduring success, who know how many different areas could benefit from it?

Secondly, it makes up for the deficiencies and biases that have long been evident in reporting. Commenting on Homicide Watch, American writer Clay Shirky points out that “The old saying for New York papers was not to bother covering murders north of 96th street, where the victims were almost certainly black… news organizations aren’t generally in the business of introducing their readers to the realities of life elsewhere in their town.”

Homicide Watch covers everything, without favor. Journalism on this scale – and with this level of inclusiveness – has rarely been attempted, especially in an age where traditional beat journalism is fading, as physical media struggles to increase readership.

In this respect, Homicide Watch does more than fight crime and provide a memorial to victims. It’s also keeping local beat reporting alive. Actually, when you put it like that, maybe there is a TV show in there after all.

In Europe and the US right now, almost no issue commands more air time than persistently high unemployment rates (other than what Kate Middleton is wearing, of course). But beyond the depressing jobless figures, new trends may be changing labor markets, and the economy as a whole.

Crowdsourcing was one of 2011’s buzzwords, but its potential is still largely unrealized. 3D printing looks set to digitize manufacturing. Old people – many of whom can now turn on computers – may not be able to retire as soon as we thought. These converging trends may change the way we work for the better – if managed properly.

The factory moves out, and then comes home again

Since the industrial revolution, the concept of a job hasn’t changed too much. Most people spend weeks searching job ads for a new boss, then the next forty years trying to avoid him (usually he’s still a him). The assembly line was born and then left home to see the world, taking manufacturing jobs with it. Technology has made workplaces more efficient (and made slacking off on company time more fun), but robots haven’t really taken over workplaces like we thought they would. Indeed, most of our colleagues are still frustratingly human.

But the concept of a job is changing rapidly. Crowdsourcing platforms like Freelancer mean millions of people don’t have to deal with a boss or colleagues anymore. Retirees and stay-at-home moms can rejoin the workforce, from the comfort of their homes.

3D printing will soon allow us to produce much of what we need locally. Rather than sending away to China for a spare part, companies like Ponoko will allow us to download its design and print it at home. Overseas factories will still exist where they are more efficient, but as Ponoko’s founder, Dave ten Have said “we are going to see a rebalancing – a considered move away from the mass centralization we’ve experienced in the last 30 years.” Products will have greater cultural relevance and intimacy.

The power of the people

Like 3D printing, the potential of crowdsourcing is enormous. Almost every day new applications for it pop up, from composing ringtones to curing AIDS.

Currently, many of these solutions are more gimmicky than great. If any of you clicked on the ringtone crowdsourced above (and didn’t smash your computer trying to make it shut up) you’ll know what I mean. But the industry is still in its infancy. As it matures, and its strengths are understood and applied more effectively, we can expect the co-operation and efficiency it facilitates to deliver increasingly powerful results.

For those of us in the crowdsourcing industry, the simultaneous rise of 3D printing is particularly exciting because it gives more power to the individuals in our crowds. This opens the door for new forms of crowdsourcing, especially in manufacturing, which is predicted to be a major area of growth. Add crowdfunding to the mix and suddenly any product that appeals to a niche is possible.

As with any major disruptive shifts, these changes will create winners and losers. Like any industry, 3D printing and crowdsourcing will need careful regulation. We want people printing money from home, not guns. But those governments who also encourage innovation and growth in these industries will be most likely to benefit from them. Their depressing conversations about local unemployment rates may soon become uplifting success stories.

As a long-time Apple Fanboy, I’ve done my fair share of preaching from the book of Jobs. But since He passed away/ascended into heaven, many people have been wondering if Apple can continue to delight the world with groundbreaking products. The iPhone 5 was a crucial test for the new leaders of the world’s most valuable company. So far the results have been less than brilliant.

Is Apple as lost as we are?

The main criticism levelled at the new phone is that the changes are only incremental. Bigger, lighter, faster, but where’s the wow-factor?

Just as damning, perhaps, is the substitution of one of the most useful apps – Google Maps – with a half-baked Apple version. All over the world stories are emerging of problems with the service, including woefully incorrect directions to destinations, confusion over place names, plus the absence of public transport information. Not since Deep Impact have so many landmarks been found underwater. (Check the Amazing IOS6 Maps Tumblr for screenshots of some absurd results from here in Helsinki.)

That’s possibly where we, the devoted crowds of Apple worshippers, come in. Like when Siri was released, it seems Apple Maps is Apple’s version of a minimum viable product: released well before it was perfected, on the basis that the feedback we give Apple when using the service will allow it to improve it.

Trudy Muller, of Apple, told AllThingsD “as Maps is a crowd-based solution, the more people use it, the better it will get.” This led PandoDaily to proclaim: “In essence, every iPhone 5 user becomes part of a massive crowdsourcing experiment.”

What are we supposed to be doing?

But exactly how the crowd is set to improve the service remains unclear. Apple sources data from the crowdsourced OpenStreetMaps initiative, which means it does rely on some crowd-based information. Its maps also crowdsource traffic data. But, unlike Google’s Map Maker, there is no collaborative mapping tool.

But neither of these crowd-based solutions will address the problems with Apple Maps. My Google searching did not shed any light on this issue, although it did reveal that I’m not the only one scratching my head over it.

Right now l’m wondering if the only way we can help is to simply log errors, and wait for ex-Google Maps staff to fix them.

If this is Apple’s solution, then perhaps a more effective crowd-based solution would be to use the crowd-based app Waze. That or go directly to the former Google Maps staff by using Google maps on your iPhone’s web browser. Somehow I don’t think this is what Apple intended.

If you can help shed some light on this issue, I’m all ears!

On Wednesday last week, after two years of increasingly feverish rumors and speculation, the wait was finally over. All over the world, people stopped what they were doing and tuned in to find out whether it could possibly live up to the hype.

The answer, my friends, is an emphatic “yes.”

Slim enough to fit in your bag, visually stunning and packing a real punch under the cover, the original hardcopy version of Short Stories About Tiny Tasks made a real splash when we released it last year (at least when it fell in the bath).

But on Wednesday, the future became reality. Now, thanks to Publification.com, Short Stories About Tiny Tasks, a collection of our favorite Microtask blogs, is also available as an ebook from the Amazon Kindle Store and iBooks (see sidebar for more links).

As expected, pricing starts at $199 for the… OK, actually, there are some pricing issues. We wanted the book to be free. However, due to the territorial policies of Amazon, you might see it with a price tag of 0,89€ or more, depending on which URL and account you use to access the Kindle Store. Rest assured that this charge is not fundraising for the island or zeppelin-mounted death ray I’ve been saving for. It’s just that in some countries we can’t price it at zero.

Alternatively, you can also still download a free ePub or PDF version or read it online. Whether you choose to read it on a Kindle, PC, or your shiny new iPhone 5, we hope you enjoy it.

What is wisdom? It seems like a simple question, but as any Dungeons and Dragons player knows, there is a difference between wisdom and intelligence. Legendary D&D creator (and awesomely named dude) Gary Gygax explained the distinction: Intelligence is noticing that it’s raining. Wisdom is putting up an umbrella.

The wisdom of crowds effect has been on a turbulent journey over the last decade, graduating from a statistical curiosity to a key part of a global industry. The concept has been at the heart of some incredible achievements, from the creation of Wikipedia to helping data analysts win chocolate (although we won’t mention the lack of wisdom the crowd has shown in watching, let alone voting in, the X Factor).

Experts witless?

But despite the growing pile of crowd-based success stories, some people contend that the crowd’s wisdom has been overstated. As the CIA turns to crowdsourcing to predict global events, some of its own experts are questioning whether this is a good idea. Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA and State Department analyst, provides a snappy argument to me and my fellow crowd-evangelists: “Crowds produce riots. Experts produce wisdom.”

The CIA’s project uses a modified version of the wisdom of crowds effect called Aggregative Contingent Estimation. While this may sound like a classic CIA euphemism the process is actually a carefully designed way to create a crowd of experts and pool a broad range of analysis and opinion.

It’s too early to tell if the CIA’s crowd of experts will be successful in predicting the next major global event. (For the record, I predict that 2013 will be the year of Finnish global supremacy, but I’m not an expert). While we await the results of this experiment, it’s worth considering the important role that individual experts can play in the evolution of crowd wisdom. After all, they are the experts.

A word from the wise

Coming back to the wise words of Gary Gygax, it is experts who can supply the crowd with the intelligence that gives them a better chance of attaining wisdom. So instead of asking them to compete with the crowd, we could use their expert knowledge to provide deeper context and
allow the crowd to make better informed decisions.

The best known recent example of a catastrophic failure of crowd intelligence is the attempt to predict the price of Facebook’s IPO before its disastrous launch (check out on the subject for the grisly details). It seems it was the presence of experts in the crowd that drove the predictions, replacing the crowd’s wisdom with blind optimism.

But what would have happened if the experts had shared their specialist knowledge with the crowd instead of their (mistaken) conclusions? If wisdom lies in forming the correct conclusion, then intelligence lies in realizing the true nature of the problem. In short, if we don’t know it’s raining, why would we put up an umbrella? Traditionally, the point of an expert is to provide the right answers. But, at least when it comes to the wisdom of crowds, what we may actually need from them is the right questions.

As the original mad scientist, Nikola Tesla has been a source of inspiration to geeks of all types for over a century. The Serbian-American electro-wizard transformed the world with his development of alternating current (and inspired direct current supporter Thomas Edison to electrocute an elephant), before vanishing into madness and obscurity.

If you’re interested in crowdfunding, you’ll probably know all about Operation: Let’s build a Goddamn Tesla Museum, which has become one of crowdfunding’s most high-profile success stories to date. So far, over $1m has been raised to preserve the Wardenclyffe facility, the site of a particularly fascinating (and ultimately tragic) period in Tesla’s life. But as well as being an inspiring example of grass-roots crowdfunding success, the Wardenclyffe facility provides a useful insight into the pitfalls of funding today’s mad science.

Tesla is my Ohmboy

Tesla’s work was backed by J.P. Morgan and John Jacob Astor (which today would be the equivalent of having Bill Gates and the Sultan of Brunei in your corner). Both were confident that the man who won the “current wars” (without electrocuting a single elephant) would fulfil his promises of wireless power. Alas, the project fell apart in 1905, when Tesla’s alternating current patent expired and the royalty cheques stopped coming.

Unable to find more backing, and with Morgan and Astor growing increasingly impatient, the madness began to overwhelm the science, and Tesla suffered a mental breakdown. Wardenclyffe was foreclosed, and the site has been abandoned ever since.

This sad tale raises an interesting question: if Tesla had crowdfunded his research instead of relying on impatient big wigs, would we now be free from the tyranny of endless power cables (and have an unlimited supply of hats)? Is crowdfunding the key to unlocking the potential of the misunderstood geniuses of the world?

Igor! Check the KickStarter page!

One of the best things about crowdfunding is it gives inventors and innovators access to millions of new investors. Crowdfunding gives even the maddest scientists the chance to fund their zeppelin-mounted death-rays without having to pander to the impatient scrutiny of large, experienced investors. Hopefully this will mean the world will benefit from more inspired innovation (who doesn’t want their very own death ray?).

But the problem with mad science is that it’s very difficult to tell the difference between a crazy-haired genius and a crazy-haired crazy person. This is especially so if you’re an internet-based crowd, rather than a local, expert investor. My concern is that lots of people will lose lots of money funding crazy schemes, not only wasting their money but also discrediting crowdfunding.

Sorting the bad from the mad

Thankfully, sites like Petridish and #Sci-Fund Challenge offer a potential solution to this problem, by promoting the work of established research teams and insisting on university support before opening projects to donations.

Both sites insist on hard science, so if you were hoping to finance your perpetual motion machine, you’d better look elsewhere (and also consider visiting a psychiatrist, or at the very least investing in a high school physics book).

It is said that the difference between genius and insanity is measured only by success. By making sure that the crowd are funding mad scientists and not bad scientists (or just plain madness), sites like these provide a healthy dose of reality. The history of invention and discovery is full of live wires like Tesla. But as any electrical engineer will tell you, every live wire needs to be earthed.

If the Discovery Channel ever makes a documentary called When Crowdsourcing Goes Wrong, I suggest you watch it. I say this partly because, as you probably know by now, our industry is full of eye candy. After all, there’s no better way to tone up for summer than working long hours in front of a monitor and near continuous travel. Even more compelling, however, is the fact that attempts at using the crowd can be interesting and occasionally hilarious, for all the wrong reasons.

The most recent example of crowdsourcing going wrong involves a campaign by pizza company Villa Fresh to come up with a new name for apple flavored Mountain Dew. As discussed in a recent Crowdsourcing.org post, the process was hijacked by pranksters from Reddit and 4chan, leaving the online leader-board filled with suggestions like “Gushing Granny” and “Fapple.” This is not an isolated incident. As General Motors once painfully found out, sometimes the crowd acts unpredictably.

The thing is, it’s not hard to see why Villa Fresh turned to crowdsourcing in this instance. Crowdsourcing efforts in very similar scenarios have brought excellent results. Alas, in this case, the restaurant chain was left with an embarrassing waste of time and brand credibility, and probably a stern glance from Mountain Dew owners PepsiCo. I wouldn’t want to be the guy to climb Mount Pepsi and tell the bosses up there that you accidentally named their new drink “Diabeetus.”

Recently we’ve offered advice on how to bring crowdsourcing into manufacturing, and how to use crowdsourcing to get help from your community. Here we offer some Villa Fresh-inspired ideas for effective “crowd control.”

Know your objectives.

It’s always necessary to have a solid aim, and when you think about it, Villa Fresh actually achieved its goal to “name a new flavor.” In retrospect, a better objective might have been “name a new flavor something appropriate.

Vet the crowd.

One of the best things about the crowd is its diverse thinking and creativity. In order to stimulate this unpredictable creativity you need a wide and mixed audience. But this doesn’t mean you can’t vet the crowd in certain instances. In Digitalkoot we did this by only allowing volunteers to actually participate once they had demonstrated that they were genuinely trying to help (one malicious player wasted hours deliberately typing in incorrect words that never did any harm to our results because he or she did not pass the vetting stage).

Actively guide the crowd.

Guiding or setting boundaries for the crowd often produces better results. A previous Mountain Dew-organized campaign on Facebook was more tightly controlled and much more successful for it. Guidance can work wonders too. When it comes to design contests, the more feedback you give the crowd the better the results are likely to be.

There’s a Kardashian-sized but coming, though. While minimizing the risk of the crowd behaving badly is good, you still have to maintain the integrity of the whole process. Heavy-handedness in certain circumstances will stifle creativity and potentially alienate the crowd. Vet the crowd too much, and you may submit to expert bias (or end up with no crowd at all). Being too rigid in your aims will deny you the occasional flash of unexpected brilliance.

It’s a tricky balance to find, but there have been plenty of examples of companies getting it right. And admittedly getting it wrong can be entertaining. Glass of “Diabeetus”, anybody?

As regular readers of this blog know, there is nothing we like more than discussing strange and new types of crowdsourcing. From weird music-related experiments to the incidence of expressions such as “I need to” during the Mad Men era, we try to keep you informed with what is going on across our industry.

Every now and then, however, we use this forum to talk about something much closer to our home and hearts: ourselves.

For the last few years Microtask has focused its efforts on solving the traditional problems associated with document processing. Basically we have been trying to magically transfer those nearly illegible, dusty piles of paper forms that fill the dark comers of your office into digital format on your computer.

This summer…(pretend I am saying this really slowly in that movie preview voice), Mike Rotask rises again, to save the world from the evil problems associated with document processing, and banish those paper forms you hate, forever.

Ok, the animation is not quite Batman, but it does describe how our incredimagic team of oracles and sorcerers thinkers and engineers managed to triumph over the traditional impediments to document processing. Enjoy the magic of cinema, and give us some social media love!

Ever since we began helping the National Library of Finland correct mistakes in its old newspaper archive, I have noticed myself developing a slightly anti social interest in historical texts. I say ‘anti social’ because of its effect on conversation: what I have found is that while most people claim to be interested in history, the best way to get unwanted guests to leave your house after a dinner party is to start discussing the technical challenges presented by digitizing historical records.

To overcome this problem in the Digitalkoot project, we sacrificed thousands of cute moles: if volunteers failed to enter the correct words the poor moles fell to their digital deaths. (While we felt bad about manipulating people’s love for cartoon animals, we can still sleep at night because it was for a good cause.)

How to get people interested in history (without hurting animals)

This experience is the reason I admire historian Ben Schmidt’s recent success in getting people enthusiastic about history and digitization.

What Schmidt has ingeniously done is take two of today’s most popular TV shows – Mad Men and Downton Abbey – and check their dialogue for historical accuracy against millions of texts published over the last few hundred years. (For example, apparently even the phrase “I need to”, so common in Mad Men, is not something that people said in the 1960s).

This study was made possible with Google’s Ngram viewer. As we discussed about a year ago, Ngram allows you to chart how many times a different combination of words or letters has appeared in Google Books’ huge corpus of 5 million texts published between 1500 and 2008.

Along with the many fascinating results, the great thing about this project is that it has managed to get the media interested in Ngram again. My own Ngram-like analysis using just normal old Google Search found that after some initial excitement in 2010 and 2011, almost everyone had forgotten about Ngram until Schmidt found a way to include it in the same sentence as Don Draper.

Don’t forget about the crowd

The reason I bring this up is that I am disappointed with the lack of interest the world’s institutions have shown in the technology we now possess to preserve, analyse and search historical records. (Even Google Books seems to have lost momentum in its efforts digitize the world’s texts.)

While OCR technology still makes too many mistakes when digitizing texts, we know that people are actually willing to give their time to correct them, assuming we can find a way to include cute animals or handsome Mad Men in the tasks.

As we found with Digitalkoot, the gains from such projects actually go beyond the statistical results: not only have hundreds of thousands of people freely volunteered to help, it has also been a great way to get them interested in the historical records themselves. The only downside of this is that bringing up the digitization of records is no longer a reliable way to make the last dinner guests leave my house.

As anyone who has watched a few movies with unofficial subtitles will know, quality control can be a bit of an issue. But even in the world of terrible, inaccurate subtitles, nothing comes close to the awful poetry that is Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West (better known as Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith). The homemade subtitles that accompany this pirated version of George Lucas’ blockbuster are so wildly mangled that it has achieved cult status. (To give you a taste, in this version “Obi Wan Kenobi” is ingeniously translated to “Ratio the Tile”).

Thankfully, the mastermind behind Backstroke of the West has absolutely nothing to do with an incredible piece of subtitling software in development at the University of Rochester.

I see what you mean

The software was created to provide deaf people with real-time subtitles for everyday life. Currently, deaf people are forced to rely on expensive professional transcribers, who are only available at certain times. The Rochester research team, led by Walter Lasecki, instead rely on Mechanical Turk users to provide live translation for a fraction of the cost, day or night.

As well as helping deaf people navigate the noisy world, this crowdsourced transcription system is perfect for travelers who don’t speak the local language. The researchers plan to launch a smartphone app called Legion:Scribe this October, which will help you pay too much for souvenirs in almost any language you can think of.

The possibilities are truly exciting. The app could transform your smartphone into a Star Trek-style Universal Translator, letting you talk to absolutely anyone. If the researchers manage to hit their goal of a near-instant transcription, you could even watch a play, lecture or movie, no matter where you are in the world.

But what prevents you from getting nonsense like Backstroke of the West? The reason Star Wars Episode III came out so mangled in this translation (apart from the input of the lizard-being who replaced George Lucas in 1989) is partly because it’s the work of just one person (apparently this person translated what he heard into Chinese, then fed it through a machine translator to get the English subs that are so hilariously mangled).

Listen and earn

Legion:Scribe breaks up the stream of sound into bite-size chunks, and members of the crowd transcribe each chunk for a small fee. Just as we’ve found at Microtask, the researchers noted that smaller tasks led to improved accuracy, and that by letting multiple members transcribe each chunk, the work can be automatically verified. As Mechanical Turk does not have such a system in place (unlike some crowd computing companies we could mention), the researchers had to create their own algorithm, which is currently in the beta-testing phase.

The beta version of Legion: Scribe has a 74% accuracy when transcribing ordinary conversation, compared with an average 88.5% for professional transcribers. This is a significant difference, but the researchers aim to tweak the software and close the gap before the final version hits the app store.

The Legion: Scribe project is an inspiring illustration of what human computing can achieve. By combining innovative research with the existing power of the crowd, the Rochester research team isn’t just helping millions of deaf people to communicate. They may also demolish the spoken language barrier entirely.

Like the Descriptive Camera, which I discussed back in May, the Legion:Scribe app has gone from idea to reality at an astonishing speed. The fact it already generates reasonably accurate results demonstrates how far our understanding of distributed labor has developed in the last few years. Let’s just hope that it won’t prevent entertaining disasters like Backstroke of the West popping up every now and then!

When people ask me “What’s your dream holiday?” I usually lie to them. I say some exotic holiday destination that makes me sound normal. I don’t say space or the moon or the bottom of the sea, because I’m nervous it might make me sound like a dreamer or full of myself. Which I am (not).

But the truth is I am a lot like Richard Branson, Ashton Kutcher and James Cameron. OK, I’m not famous or rich or mega-successful, but if I was, instead of visiting the Bahamas or Thailand I’d be travelling to the bottom of the ocean or space. Now that’s a holiday.

Unfortunately, unlike Richard and his pals, I don’t quite have the money to build a spaceship or even rent one (yet). Or so I thought, until I came across GoFundMe, a crowd based fundraising site. On it people can raise money for just about anything at all, from “Accidents & Personal Crisis” to “Travel & Adventure”. Could crowdfunding be the answer to my lofty ambitions? Does this sort of crowdfunding have the potential to really take off?

Below I present to you what I see as the pros and cons of the concept. I’ve tried to be as impartial as possible. (If, after reading it, you’re in favor of the site, we can talk about how much you want to donate to my “Get Tommaso Out of This World” fund.)

Pro: The spirit of charity is alive and well

Even in today’s depressed global economy, it’s heartening to see so many people willing to donate money to complete strangers. For example, one charitable soul donated to a woman stricken with cancer, posting this on her micro site: “I know I don’t know you, but I know cancer…and I want you to kick its butt!” In a world that sometimes seems overrun by bloodthirsty dictators and soulless investment bankers, it’s nice to know that humanity isn’t going to hell in a ’78 Pinto just yet.

Con: Another avenue for fraudsters

For as long as charitable causes have existed, so too have fraudsters. GoFundMe is up front about the possibility that causes may be fake, and advises against donating to unknown people. Even so, it seems many people do donate to strangers. One hopes their money isn’t going to a charitable version of the “West African scam”.

Pro: Help draw attention to society’s failings (and maybe fix them)

The woman I mentioned earlier racked up an ER bill of $10,000 for what turned out to be an incorrect diagnosis. Other similar stories of unbelievable financial hardship abound on the site. Along with helping these people out, hopefully GoFundMe will draw attention to situations which society as a whole could remedy.

Con: A lack of personal responsibility?

Despite my intro to this blog, the “Travel & Adventure” section of the site makes me uncomfortable. I snooped around and found two pages to support my skepticism. One is for a person who hopes to travel to Italy for a theater program, and the other is for a person who wants to hike the Appalachian Trail.

As far as I could tell, these are two grown, healthy adults, with no physical or mental obstacles preventing them from supporting themselves. And while I’m glad they’ve set themselves some goals (mine are better), I’m unclear as to how their “needs” justify a donation page. Even if I was a close friend of one of these people, I would think that they might be better off just saving up for their trip like the rest of us do. To me the whole category seems out of place amongst the other categories dedicated to helping people in genuine need.

Overall, I think GoFundMe is a good thing, with the potential to change a lot of people’s lives. If you have a minute and a few spare dollars check it out. Help someone in need. Either that or send a nice, young, not-yet-famous, Italian lad into space.

Music is a powerful thing. It can make you laugh or cry, and even tear down the Berlin Wall (according to David Hasselhoff, anyway). The same song can mean different things to different people, with infectious tracks like Britney Spears’ ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ managing to be both the all-time most requested song on US radio as well as an instrument of torture used at Guantanamo Bay (along with ‘I Love You,’ the theme from Barney the Dinosaur, which would make me crack within seconds).

Thanks to the internet, we now have access to more music than ever before, and unless we’re trapped in a military prison, we can listen to whatever we want. iTunes lists a bewildering array of genres, from Neo-Medieval Disco to Japanoise to Pirate Metal. With so much variety on offer, and so many different types of people, is it possible to create a song that everybody will love?

A natural selection of your favorite tracks

A group of evolutionary scientists at Imperial College in London have created a crowdsourced research project which attempts to do just that. The researchers note that every time a listener chooses one song over another, they are making a creative choice, with one track being more successful than another. This process mirrors Darwinian natural selection and provides a great way to test the idea that music can evolve and adapt.

The project’s central experiment began with the creation of a piece of software called DarwinTunes, an automated music-creation system. It makes new songs from sound fragments and loops, and requires listeners to rate each song on a 5-point scale from ‘I can’t stand it!’ to ‘I love it!’ Successful loops and sounds are incorporated into the next generation of tracks, while unpopular ones are phased out, like the musical equivalent of pedigree dog breeding. A 7,000-strong crowd formed the judging panel for the initial experiments, and has so far taken the music through over 2,500 generations.

The first generation of loops was randomly generated, and barely sounded like music at all. But as the crowd selected loops which contained pleasing chords or sequences of notes, tunes began to emerge. Soon, the randomly generated sounds had become music, with popular melodies or chords surviving through the generations and cross-breeding with other successful loops.

The sound of the crowd

But what does this crowd-guided music actually sound like? At first listen, the hypnotic cascades of melodic bleeps and bloops reminded me of an early ’90s role-playing game, filling me with an irresistible urge to drink potions and rescue a princess. Though all DarwinTunes’ loops share the same palette of sounds, in order to keep the focus on melody there are a variety of distinctive tunes competing for attention. Some are sad, some cheerful, and some are downright catchy (Loop 81 in particular caught my ear, but that may be because it bears a slight resemblance to the greatest piece of video game music ever sequenced).

In the real world certain fragments of melodic DNA do seem to crop up again and again, but it’s hard to imagine legions of screaming fans queuing overnight for the chance to hear Loop 81 performed live. However, the researchers from Carnegie Mellon are not only interested in creating the perfect song. The project also provides useful data on the way individual taste and preference affects group decision making. This is a key area for future crowd research, as crowds grow larger and incorporate members from many different cultures.

More and more research is revealing the delicate balance at the heart of the “wisdom of crowds” effect: crowds thrive on diversity, but there needs to be common understanding too. By exploring our similarities, this kind of research may help us to understand and overcome our differences. Even if it doesn’t lead to the greatest song ever written, the DarwinTunes project will have a lot to tell us about what we have in common (plus, even the worst loop is bound to be better than Barney the Dinosaur, and that has to count as a victory).

Last week we discussed the new JOBS Act, which allows startups in the US to use online crowds to raise funding. We noted the huge potential this has for not just the crowdfunding industry and startups, but the investment world as a whole.

One platform that is planning to take advantage of these new laws (the UK is set to follow the US later this year) is Trillion Fund. Trillion Fund’s modest goal is to eventually raise a trillion dollars for sustainable energy projects. Just as ambitious is the fund’s goal of raising it in small increments from people looking to invest modest amounts of money.

Trillion Fund is led by a diverse group of overachievers from the investment, tech and renewable energy industries. Julia Groves is one of them. I caught up with her last week to discuss her plan to use crowdfunding to save the world (and help normal people make money from investing).

Trillion Fund is an exciting concept. Where did the idea come from?
It came about as a way to use crowdfunding to solve two problems.

The first is financial markets and the way investment works at the moment. Currently, investment opportunities for smaller investors are terrible. We want to offer these people the chance to invest directly in companies they like, and achieve a decent rate of return in doing so.

The second problem is energy generation. Almost everyone accepts that we need to find an alternative to fossil fuels fast – public support for change is enormous, especially here in Western Europe. But people think they can’t make a difference. The companies we offer to investors will all be dedicated to sustainable energy generation. People who invest with us will be helping to change the world.

If people can see where their money is going and the difference it is making, we think it has the power to change the way people invest. We want normal people to be able to get the satisfaction from investing that the super wealthy get. The equivalent of “Daddy, what did you do in the war?” for our generation might be “Mummy, what did you invest in?”

The early investors in particular will be making it possible for millions more to follow, so we have some special plans for them.

What minimum investment are you aiming for?
Eventually we want to get to $100. The more people that get involved the better. The economies of scale are particularly significant in renewable projects, but the potential benefits go beyond this, as five thousand people investing $100 will have a lot more impact than one person investing $500k.

If people have the chance to engage in meaningful, exciting projects, they might choose to invest small amounts of discretionary cash rather than wasting it on the normal consumer junk.

I hope you’re not referring to my iPhone?
No way! In fact, eventually we would like to have an app that allows investors a very convenient way to engage with us and their companies. For example I can see the output from my solar panels on an app on my Phone, (14kWhrs yesterday – and I have a small London roof!). There is something addictive about tickers and numbers going up all the time…

How will you choose which sustainable energy companies to offer?
We will choose our partners very carefully. The leadership team has a lot of experience with renewable energy projects and new ventures in general. I have spent the last two years installing solar panels on homes in the UK for example (and yes there is enough sun for it to be worthwhile! So long as the roofs face south-ish).

In the end the choice of where to invest and the level of risk is something each investor must decide for themselves. Despite our name we are not a traditional fund. Instead of choosing investments for our members, we will find the very best projects to invest in and provide the tools and information to make it as enjoyable and rewarding an experience as possible.

When should I send my check?
We are testing the platform with a couple of partners over the summer, and are working towards a public launch in the fall. The UK markets regulator is currently in the process of revising the rules relating to this space, in the same way that the SEC in the US has, so we will be working with them to ensure this new model of fund raising and engagement gets the rubber stamp. We won’t launch publicly until this process is finished. We’ll keep you posted!

So, you have a bit of spare cash you want to invest. You’re not Warren Buffet (if you are, please reply to my emails), but you’re interested in where this money goes and of course the returns that come from it. If all goes well, one day it may fund part of your retirement. That or buy an attack drone to terrorize your neighbors with.

The problem, for small investors, is finding somewhere decent to put the money.

Retail deposits are an obvious start. But after tax, inflation and fees you might as well just hide it under your mattress (uncomfortable as it might be, if your bank is Greek or Spanish it will probably still make for a better night’s sleep).

Investing directly in the stock market is unlikely to yield much greater returns – assuming you don’t lose it altogether. Managed investment funds promise the world, but seem to specialize more in hidden fees than delivering returns.

Crowdfunding a new era

As you will have guessed by now, the alternative we are coming to is crowdfunding.
Crowdfunding is a big deal: globally the 450 or so crowdfunding platforms raised $1.5bn last year. This figure that is expected to double in 2012.

So far most of this funding has been in return for rewards (like merchandise) or simply donations. Crowdfunding platforms, for the most part, have been unable to offer equity in companies by securities laws, so opportunity for ‘real’ investment has been limited.

That is, until now. Early last month, Obama signed the JOBS Act, which clears the way to offer the crowd equity in companies. The UK regulator looks set to relax laws in a similar way later this year.

Investments for the people, by the people

Already, platforms like Fundable have sprung up to take advantage of the law change, using the Kickstarter model, but offering equity as well as rewards (or at least it will, when it gets SEC approval and the SEC sets the regulatory rules for the space). This could make a huge difference for startups looking for cash (as well as exposure and a support base).

But the potential for more broadly revolutionizing the way we invest is huge. There will be teething problems and no doubt some disappointments (and money lost), but if the experience is a positive one, these law changes may seriously disrupt the current investment industry, for the benefit of small investors and companies alike.

Next week we’re talking with another new platform, the UK based Trillion Fund. Trillion Fund has the modest goal of raising a trillion dollars in order to solve the world’s energy needs. They plan to do it by making investing something profitable and engaging for normal people. I like their style. Come back next week to hear all about it.

Since we began writing this blog in late 2009, crowdsourcing had grown from a little known concept into the core of a respectable, mainstream industry (in spite of all our efforts to be rebellious and disruptive).

We had many goals for the blog when we started it. Along with making us look cool, we hoped it would chart the rise of the crowdsourcing industry. One day, we thought, we might even republish a selection of posts as a book. Something that people could read before they fall asleep at night, then use as a doorstop or paperweight. That was our dream, at least.

Today, my friends, that day has finally come. The book is called Short Stories about Tiny Tasks. In it you will find tales of industrious moles, gamified worlds and the kind of feel-good co-operation not seen since the hippie revolution of the 1960s. Each story highlights a different, surprising aspect of crowdsourcing, and reveals the incredible range of applications for collective reasoning, gamification and human computing.

To start with, we have partnered with Publification.com to make Short Stories About Tiny Tasks fully readable on every kind of mobile and desktop browser. This edition comes with some cool social features, so please feel free to share it and join the conversation. You can also download a generic ePub version. Shortly, we will also make it available from the Amazon Kindle and the iBook Store, but don’t hold your breath, as this might take a few weeks.

Finally, if you’re more of a pipe-smoking lover of the good old dead-tree format, send us an email at info@microtask.com. We are happy to post you a free paper copy.

Whatever format you choose, we hope you enjoy it!

I’d like to start with a confession: when I’m not thinking about crowdsourcing, I’m busy being a huge geek. Not trendy geek chic, unfortunately, but the old fashioned type (a trendsetter maybe?). Read on bearing this in mind.

My main vice is Magic: the Gathering, a role-play card game where players are magically-dueling wizards. The only game pieces are cards which represent classical magic spells like fire blasts and enchantments. Like I said, I’m a geek.

What does this have to do with crowdsourcing? Well, about 10 years ago, the company that makes this game turned to its fans the players, and for the first time said “you make a card”. What followed was almost a year of creative inspiration and community collaboration, resulting in two additional campaigns and a total of three extremely well-designed cards. Even today, any company that wants to tap into a crowd for creative purposes should look at Magic’s R&D team to see how to properly weigh a campaign’s incentives, barriers to entry and compartmentalization.

Incentives: all you need is love

Before the campaign, Magic’s design and R&D had always been very secretive and insular, a process conducted in such a manner that fans could neither observe nor contribute to it. Some fans turned to making their own custom cards, but they were never accepted, as Magic R&D was expressly forbidden from considering player-submitted cards. So basically here was a community that was intensely passionate, deeply creative but with no opportunity to participate in the design of the game.

In this situation, incentivizing crowd involvement was simply a matter of allowing it. That, and giving bragging rights to important people in the decision-making process, such as those who create the card’s name or key mechanic.

Removing barriers to entry

The easiest way to build a useful crowd is to find one that already exists. Magic R&D turned to the community website and blog. They were keen fans and already had some understanding of the R&D and design process from blog posts on the subject. Multiplayer games like this generally have a strong community, so Magic R&D could also count on its players to get the word out.

Dealing with compartmentalization

A common problem with crowdsourced projects is that everyone works independently, only sharing work when it is finished. This causes a lot of duplication of effort and restricts collaboration. Magic R&D avoided this by breaking the design process into 24 collaborative steps.

By controlling the process like this, Magic R&D could keep their normal, iterative design process, which may involve a card being changed dozens of times before its final print. The forum discussions between each step also allowed the community to come to a better consensus on which direction to go, and identify potential problems early on. Finally, it ensured that both Magic R&D and the community were present at every step, designing together as a unit instead of pitted against each other.

The three crowdsourcing campaigns created three new cards. All had unique effects, unlike any card that had been seen before. All were highly rated on the official card database. Each successive campaign was bigger than the last, and now some fans are asking for a fourth.

All of this happened before crowdsourcing was really “a thing”. It shows that any brand with loyal fans (and some dedication) can create something great (even if they’re not following common practice because common practice hasn’t been invented yet).

Seth has a blog, TinyWork.

An excess of confidence can be a dangerous thing. As Mark Zuckerberg ponders the jagged descent of Facebook’s share price and industry analysts scramble to explain the social network’s woes, the aura of optimism that heralded the Facebook IPO has evaporated.

So how did it all go so wrong? One clue may lie in the crowdsourced prediction site FacebookIPODayClosingPrice.com. The site was created in response to a suggestion by venture capitalist Chris Sacca that someone should create a forum where pundits could register their predictions before the big day. Although share markets are notoriously irrational, in a way it makes a lot of sense. Who better to predict something based on the whims of a crowd than a crowd?

When voting closed, a total of 2,261 Twitter users had predicted a price of $54. This was nearly $16 above the first day closing price of $38.60 (before dropping to a downright disastrous low of $30.94). Even billionaires make mistakes, but crowds are supposed to be infallible (or at least wise), right? So why did the crowd get it so wrong?

The Social Net Worth

First off, I wonder if the crowd had actually been betting its own money on the price it would have generated a more accurate guess. But otherwise, the site did everything right to properly harness the predictive power of collective reasoning: the vote didn’t exclude non-expert members, discussion was rampant on Twitter, and the experiment seemed to attract a healthy mix of views.

But a quick Twitter-stalking session reveals that of the 26 voters who correctly predicted a closing price of $38, only three were in any way experts (a Google+ engineer, a tech entrepreneur, and an analyst at Bloomberg, who probably deserves a promotion). The other correct answers came from all over the world, from Swiss web designers, Australian students and American Hockey fanatics.

In fact, it looks like experts gave the least accurate predictions. When the results are ordered by number of followers (with Chris Sacca’s 1,338,761 followers taking him and his guess of $56 to the top of the list), it becomes clear that venture capitalists, industry insiders and pundits were far too optimistic in their predictions.

The more you know, the less you know

This may not come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog who remember the concept of collective ignorance, the name given to the spooky ability of non-expert crowds to generate more accurate predictions than teams of experts, under the right conditions. The effect is partially explained by the possibility that insiders are more sensitive to hype, and that they have more invested (in some cases, literally) in the outcome.

Though the sample size of 2,261 is too small to draw firm conclusions, the results of Proud’s experiment are consistent with what we know about channelling the wisdom of the crowd. Despite the presence of hundreds of analysts, entrepreneurs and investors, it was the average citizen whose aggregate predictions were closer to the mark.

By offering a real-world example, FacebookIPODayClosingPrice.com adds to the weight of academic studies into curious crowd effects like collective ignorance. What initially looks like a crowdsourcing failure is actually a fascinating opportunity for analysis (and Twitter-stalking). This may be small comfort to those who lost money in the IPO, but will hopefully assist future projects harness the wisdom of the crowd.

As anyone who has ever wandered the aisles of an airport bookstore knows, the world today is a flat and shrinking global village (with a long tail), where everyone is friends with Kevin Bacon. Those of us who spend our time immersed in the hyper-connected world that crowdsourcing inhabits find this all very plausible. But how true is it, really? Is the world a village where anonymity (or avoiding Kevin Bacon and Joseph Kony) is now impossible?

Last month’s TAG Challenge, suggests we are not there, just yet. The TAG Challenge was a real-life crowdsourced gaming competition in which five “jewel thieves” hid in plain sight in cities around the world. To win, teams had to locate and snap pictures of the suspects by any means they could think of. Using the crowd (through forums, social media and such) was vital.

TAG, you’re it
While three of the thieves were found by teams, two were not. Where were these two, you ask? In Pyongyang’s first supermarket? In the slums of Nairobi or sewers of Delhi? Actually, no. They were in Stockholm and London. (Clearly no one won the Carmen Sandiego Lifetime Achievement Award this time round.)

For crime-fighters and crowdsourcerers (yes, that’s a new term) around the world this is disappointing – especially if you consider that this kind of lend-us-your-eyes crowdsourcing only really works in populated areas. It doesn’t even take into account the fact that 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, where it is apparently exceedingly difficult to find people. (Just think: even with all of the technology we have today – GPS, smartphones, satellites floating around in the thermosphere – there are vast regions of the world where pirates still ply their trade. Pirates! In 2012! This is no excuse, by the way, Johnny Depp. Please do not make any more Pirates of the Caribbean movies.)

Of course, if you’re into global hide and seek challenges, the TAG Challenge is not the only game in town (“phew!” I hear you say). There is also Geocaching, in which participants try to find hidden items using teamwork, GPS and mobile phones. But, like crowdsourcing, this game works a lot better when the object of your search leaves itself open to being found. If I really wanted to hide my Lucky Charms, I’m not going to post their coordinates online and leave them under a bush at the local dog park.

So even today with all our crowdsourcing and hi-tech toys, you can disappear just by heading somewhere a little off the map (apparently London and the Indian Ocean are equally good for this) or invest in a decent disguise. Does this mean that the power and reach of crowdsourcing is overrated? Perhaps, when it comes to tracking people down. After all, there are quite a few of us humans now.

But this does not mean that crowdsourcing itself is overrated. Ok, so we couldn’t track down a jewel thief in Stockholm. (Did I mention that Pain of Salvation was playing a free concert at Klubben that night? My guess is a strange man would not have stuck out in this crowd).

The more important point is that these sorts of challenges are even plausible. To me, this fact speaks volumes about where humanity is heading. In a world where billions of people are becoming more connected every minute, the power of the crowd is virtually limitless. Harnessing it is another question, of course. (One that we never get tired of discussing.)

If you’ve ever had a close encounter of the lamppost kind you’ll know that the eye can sometimes deceive us. But considering just how complex the eye is you might think it would let us down more often.

You may remember from your high school biology classes that basically (very basically) light enters the eye through the pupil and falls on photo receptive cells called rods and cones. These send an electrical impulse that travels through the optic nerve and into the brain, creating the sensation we experience as sight. All of this happens in a fraction of a second.

Inside the retina are 5 different types of neuron (although some scientists believe there may be as many as 60) and there are millions of each type in each eye. With some 100 billion neurons in the brain as a whole, trying to understand how it all works is no easy task.

Here’s looking at you Crowd

Undeterred by these gargantuan numbers, a group from MIT (who must have a few neurons to spare) has developed the EyeWire project. The project incorporates some ingenious techniques to map the mind-bogglingly complex web of neurons in the retina.

Beginning with a series of cross sections through the retinal neurons of a flatworm, they developed a sophisticated image processing algorithm that created a 3D model of the neural network from the 2D images.

To check the accuracy of the 3D models they required something even more sophisticated than the algorithm. Realizing that the very subject of their inquiry was probably the best tool for the job the team broke the images up into small blocks and distributed them online for volunteers to verify by sight.

The result is a sort of optical puzzle. The player traces a colored neuron through a series of 2D images as it weaves and branches its way through clusters of seemingly identical blobs. Your task is to fill in any color missing from the neuron.

At first it seems an impossible task but it quickly becomes almost intuitive. After several minutes of squinting at a series of blobs it is incredibly satisfying to find a new branch and have it pop up on the 3D window in the corner of your screen.

The most determined players will get a position on the leader board. Maintaining that position or moving up the board should provide ample motivation to keep people coming back to what is an enjoyably challenging and surprisingly relaxing way to spend your time.

The Future Looks Bright

As well as providing enjoyment for its volunteers Eyewire is also contributing to our understanding of the eye’s nervous system. Potentially the research could result in treatments for disorders like epilepsy and new ways to revert and prevent different types of blindness.

The method is already being applied to the rest of the brain’s neurons with the “Wired Differently” program which could result in better understanding and treatments for conditions like autism and schizophrenia. Perhaps one day we may even understand the brain well enough to prevent the hilarious but debilitating problem of walking into glass doors.

What are you planning to do on July 19th? “Sit on a beach sipping a mojito” may be your answer, but it is wrong. What we really want to hear is “I’m attending Crowdopolis 2012 in Los Angeles”. See? It wasn’t that hard (and conferences are better for your skin).

Quick recap: that day, our friends at Daily Crowdsource are organizing an event about the future of crowdsourcing in advertising, tech, and content marketing. And they want you, the expert crowd, there to voice your opinion!

You can take a look at the agenda here (it’s a work in progress, so make sure you check it periodically) and at the confimed list of speakers here.

Specially priced early birds tickets are going fast, so make sure you buy one now.

Plus, you’ll be able to attend the afterparty to network with all speakers and guests after the final presentation, so you’ll even get that mojito eventually.