Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down

PithArtist

Crowdsourcing has the capacity to form a sort of perfect meritocracy. Gone are pedigree, race, gender, age, and qualification. What remains is the quality of the work itself.

-Jeff Howe

And there it is in a nutshell:  the crowd is king in the new media landscape.  Sure, nobody thinks the crowd is a great place to reach for, oh, architectural recommendations for nuclear safety or for accurate translations of dead languages or for accurate weather predictions, but for much of what people like to see online, the crowd is the first and in some cases last place one needs to look to amass a big pile of content.

Of course, other, less palatable things also are organized into big indiscriminate piles, and you can find these piles on any farm, attracting flies.  That’s why a good crowdsourcing application has a voting mechanism so the individual contributions can be rated and further organized into pieces that the crowd likes.  The “like” mechanism here at CTP is still under development and pretty soon you’ll be able to sort through the database using the “like” ratings so that the “good stuff” pops right to the top.