Times Online experiments with crowdsourcing
Written on March 12, 2008
Times Online (the one in Britain) makes its first foray into crowdsourcing by putting Times Online Budget Survey online and making it their cover story. They've used a mash-up of Google Maps, Google Forms, and Yahoo Pipes to power it. Although not as accurate as an opinion poll, the end product is nevertheless interesting and visually appealing: more than 400 people left their comments as to what bothers them in the upcoming UK budget for next year. Great way to give readers a say. Curiously, the Times staff got inspired by a detailed post that Andy Dickinson, a popular journalism blogger, wrote on this blog about how to create data mash-ups...
Not everyone is happy with the "poll" label attached to the experiment. Martin Stabe writes that "to sacrifice the intellectual rigour of a story for the sake of fostering online “community†or experimenting with “crowdsourcing†is a very strange set of journalistic priorities indeed". True enough. But it is still nice to see them experimenting with such relatively new tools as Google Forms, even though they may need to invent a name other than "poll "for it.
Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, mash-ups, journalism, media, newmedia, data
Not everyone is happy with the "poll" label attached to the experiment. Martin Stabe writes that "to sacrifice the intellectual rigour of a story for the sake of fostering online “community†or experimenting with “crowdsourcing†is a very strange set of journalistic priorities indeed". True enough. But it is still nice to see them experimenting with such relatively new tools as Google Forms, even though they may need to invent a name other than "poll "for it.
Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, mash-ups, journalism, media, newmedia, data
Filed in: crowdsourcing, newmedia.
