Google on Monday unveiled a new Web-based tool, Map Maker, that lets people add roads, lakes, businesses, and other features to unmapped regions of Google Maps.
Google Map Maker lets people add details to maps in some countries.
(Credit: Google)With the tool, people can using tracing tools to build maps in Cyprus, Iceland, Pakistan, and Vietnam, according to the Google LatLong blog. Also open for cartographic contributions are several Caribbean nations: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's great that this kind of activity can be crowd-sourced (please excuse the jargon) so the community (please excuse the jargon again) can contribute to a project that reduces the amount of digitally uncharted terrain. Google has given us a way to help make a difference that, while small, could collectively become quite large.
But on the other hand, I can think of worthy causes in greater need of charity or free labor than Google. If we're all going to be augmenting Google Maps with user-generated content, wouldn't it be nice if we could do it through a more neutral mechanism that lets others benefit from the work, too? Geotagged entries in Wikipedia show on Google Maps, but not Google Maps alone, at least theoretically.
Overall, I think my first reaction will carry the day for me.
That's because, fundamentally, Google Maps is a service not just consumed by many but also repackaged by many through the availability of the Google Maps API (application programming interface). So until the day Google flips its Don't Be Evil switch to the "off" position, Google Maps is in effect a public utility, and many can benefit from contributions to the service.
Google Map Maker looks slick, but it would be slicker with better satellite imagery. Parts of Iceland, one of my favorite places on Earth, are too coarse for any tracing.
Remember the movie The Game, with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn as unlikely brothers, shot before the backdrop of vertiginous San Francisco?
Well, here's a new interface for the city by the Bay: SFZero is "a new representation for the data that's already there. Your mind is full of inaccurate representations that are affecting the way you use the San Francisco data flow, steering you away from interaction and collaboration and toward unproductive reflexive data loops.
SFZero designers are working double shifts to engineer this next-generation interface that will bring you together with your cohabitants to experience the freedom that is hard-coded into San Francisco's protocol."
Sounds enigmatic, looks enigmatic, and is enigmatic. I am therefore not sure if I fully get it, but in any case, SFZero seems to be a new kind of ARG (alternate-reality game)--a "Collaborative Production Game," as they call it.
"Let Someone Else Plan Your Day!" SFZero says. "Release total control of your life to an anonymous source that supplies you with instructions and directions!"
How can you not sign up for that?
Hat tip to Chelsea Holden Baker.
Crowdsourcing has entered the mainstream big-time. It has become daunting to find a brand these days that does NOT have some crowdsourcing program in place.
My Starbucks Idea is just the latest example: Starbucks asks its consumers for advice, and besides certainly receiving a lot of good ideas, the troubled coffee chain makes consumers feel part of the brand remake.
It's the same template as usual: engage your community, harness its creativity, and let it create the content for you.
It works, sure, but it's getting stale. For some reason, marketing trends take two to three years before they are fully embraced, but if they are, then they become annoyingly ubiquitous (remember the "Tipping Point"?).
The reason is simple: Marketing executives are notoriously risk-averse (Seth Godin once reckoned that only if you're willing to put your job on the line will you do something truly innovative in marketing), and a model like crowdsourcing provides the right balance between safety net ("many others are doing it") and cutting edge ("crowdsourcing?" the CEO shrugged).
Crowdsourcing was a disruptive innovation two years ago, but now it's time to innovate crowdsourcing. It is a viable trend that has implications far beyond the marketing profession, but someone needs to take it to the next level.
So in the spirit of crowdsourcing, let me ask you: in the next stage, what could be a more innovative application of crowdsourcing?
(Credit:
Wikimedia)
After attempts to "crowdsource" the purchase of a soccer club, it was obviously just a matter of time until the concept of crowdsourcing--the act of outsourcing a job or task to a group of people--would be applied to the actual game.
The Israeli team Hapoel Play65 Kiryat Shalom, a shared project of the online backgammon room Play65 and the Israeli social network for sports fans Web2sport, prides itself on being the first Web 2.0 soccer club in the world.
The club has begun experimenting with a wisdom-of-the-fans approach that allows the team's supporters to monitor the game online and suggest starting lineup, tactics, and substitutions--in other words be the manager and coach. On the club's Web site, fans can drag virtual players into their preferred positions on a pitch diagram. The information is then collated and the players who get the most votes line up for the next match.
Ahead of the season's opening match, some 6,000 people took advantage of this opportunity. However, it remains disputable whether the wisdom of the crowd can match the solitary genius of star coaches like Arsene Wenger (Arsenal London) or Frank Rijkaard (FC Barcelona): in its first crowdsourced game, Hapoel Play65 Kiryat Shalom lost 3-2 to Maccabi Ironi Or Yehuda in injury time.
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