10 Examples Of How Crowdsourcing Is Changing The World

The mind-bendingly awesome podcast RadioLab once told the story of a 1906 country fair at which attendees were invited to guess the weight of a large ox. Hoping for a cash prize, about 800 people made guesses, though none was right. Afterward, a statistician analyzed the written guesses and discovered something shocking: the average of all the guesses was a mere one pound away from the exact weight of the ox. The moral? Sometimes a crowd can be smarter than any one of its members, even when they're not actually working together. This is just one of the many, many things that fascinates me about crowdsourcing, the idea of taking almost any task and farming it out to the masses. Today I wanted to highlight a few clever uses of crowdsourcing, just to show how it's quickly changing almost every aspect of online commerce, research and even human interaction...