Crowdsourcing goes public

Let me start by sharing a story with you ...

Imagine that you have a problem, a huge problem! Your problem is that you need to give millions of people from all walks of life original high quality media each day. Sounds easy enough right?

Now imagine you have over 100 different news sources with thousands of pages of new content each day. Since you are very smart, you realize that you can't do this yourself. So, you hire a fantastic team of editors to help you. After a week or two you are happy, but you have only made a dent, your content is biased and shallow. You are trying to drink from a fire hose, there is too much information! Not only that, but there are lots of duplicate content and a whole bunch of crap and spam too! It becomes harder and harder for you to generate quality content with each passing day since content is being created exponentially and new sources are being added on a daily basis.

What can you do??

If this problem sounds familiar and sounds like it's been solved... it has. It was solved by Kevin Rose and everyone else over at Digg. They realized quickly that the hierarchical days of pushing media down the pipe was not going to scale for this and future generations. So what did they do? They gave away a certain degree of control and made everybody a contributor, editor and reader. They utilized the concept of crowdsourcing and changed the way a generation processed media.

Crowdsourcing is a very powerful and profound way of looking at problems. I will go out on a limb and say that I believe many of the hardest problems can only be solved using these kinds of methods. This goes back to Carl Jung's idea of the Collective Unconscious, human beings have an amazing way of sharing information. One day we will learn how to disseminate knowledge from the void but until then, the Internet is the next best thing.

I had a great talk today with a smart guy from Bean Bucket and we agreed that it's time to take these ideas and apply them to lots of different fields. I have one in the works that's been on paper for about 2 weeks, in TextMate for about a week and will be online in a few days.

Stay tuned... and get ready to count.