Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is simply the act of being in the midst of a split in the road, that split is: A) Go the traditional route, keep the same production intact and have everything on the same frequency or B) Go the nontraditional route, find a group of people who can create/achieve what you’re looking for and at a significantly cheaper cost. The issue with crowdsourcing for people who handle specific tasks is now that these same people are losing their business to people who are willing to do more work between several different parties. The effect that crowdsourcing has had on companies is these companies are in the position where they aren’t looking for a singular source anymore to have something created but are now reaching out to several people to get this task completed and many of these people are eager for the opportunity to show what they can do because they’re looking for an opportunity to have positioning in this company and/or the world. The article “Digg: The Rise and Fall of an Internet Darling” stated “You’ve probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream user base. Just how low has tech sunk in digg? We have new data that shows that the number of frontpage tech stories is halving every year on digg.“. So the site lost out on it’s tech stores and is now just on the back burner to other sites such as reddit, engadget and gizmodo because of it’s lack of spreading out news. This relates to the article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” because this article shows why these companies are so interested in crowdsourcing. It states “For the last decade or so, companies have been looking overseas, to India or China, for cheap labor. But now it doesn’t matter where the laborers are—they might be down the block, they might be in Indonesia—as long as they are connected to the network. Technological advances in everything from product design software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals. Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd. The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees.” So now these companies not only have to pay their typical employees the rate they’re used to but they can also really just pick and choose who they want to carryout a task to help themselves, not illegal but definitely something that will affect the traditional worker. This also adds another element to this rise in crowdsourcing, differentiating between the professionals and the rising amateurs. The article “The Blurring Line Between Amateur and Professional” stated “Only a small group of professional writers had access to the technologies of mass publication, it seemed obvious that writing for publication was a job for professionals. And because the rest of us had never participated in the process, it was widely assumed we didn’t want to. We now know that assumption was wrong. Many ordinary people jump at the chance to be producers as well as consumers. They blog. They tweet. They upload YouTube videos and Flickr photos. They create Wikipedia.“, so now that everyone has the same tools as the professional in their hands then they’ll be able to have the same access as the professionals did as well too. So crowdsourcing essentially may affect the professionals who are at the top but give an opportunity for someone else to come and show case what their creative ability for content creation is for these platforms.

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