Sitting in one webinar with DoL on “What are we doing right? What can we do better?” (back thought: this is the positive way to question, instead of saying “what are we doing wrong”), the term “crowdsourcing” was brought up and linked to Web technologies.
The workforce as well as DoL finally realized the convergence of these two – crowdsourcing and Web 2.0.
Crowdsourcing is the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by individual (contractor/employee) and outsourcing them to a group of people in a form of an open call. In a way, it is one way of outsourcing through collaboration. The workforce sees this trend in practice for years now. Government agencies have adopted and are adopting this trend onto “how to perform better” and into development strategies. Then there are innovative individuals who came up with Gov 2.0 or Citizen 2.0 groups of those who are passionate about where our government is heading to and what all US citizens want. Running parallel to this trend is the rising popularization of Web 2.0 technologies. Nobody ever heard of Web 1.0 as it was basically “the Web as a platform” as defined by John Batelle and Tim O’Reilly. They associated Web 1.0 with the business models of Netscape and the Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Wikipedia is the younger sister of the Encyclopedia Britannica Online. The difference between the Encyclopedia Britannica Online and Wikipedia can be sourced at Wikipedia. However, to be brief , Wikipedia has a tendency to trust anonymous users in their constantly and quickly building content whereas Britannica is based on expertise to create articles and release them periodically in publications. In terms of business management, both facilitate and empower their own groups, but at two diffferent levels.
The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 began to appear in 2004. Thanks to Javascript language and content management concepts, Web 2.0 has grown into the web (2.0) sites where individuals, experts, or community members can come to gether to share ideas, data, and project progress, to blog, to forum, and to dynamically add more layers on the web platform. Regardless of how critics say, Web 2.0 technology was indeed a bubble of the last decade.
If Josh Kopelman noted that Web 2.0 had excited only 53,651 people, I can agree with that, it means
the majority of the population has not been into the content management. And who would have thought….?
How would we define Web 3.0? I look forward to seeing more facets or more than just linking ideas and people.
Crowdsourcing and Web 2.0
January 5, 2010 by lynale
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