If you've ever been driving down the highway and looked at the Google Maps application on an iPhone to see what traffic is like ahead, you may have wondered where the data behind the green, yellow, and red lines indicating real-time vehicle flow come from.
In fact, the data are coming from people just like you: users of smartphones with GPS who, by the very act of driving down the highway, are feeding back information about how fast they're going to Google, which in turn is sending it back to users of its mobile map apps.
Users of the Google Maps iPhone app can get real-time traffic flow data that is based on the passive participation of other users. This is an example of mobile crowdsourcing, something that is a growing trend, especially on iPhones.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)
Which means, of course, that the application itself is crowdsourced--that is, based on the mutual contributions of many users, all of whom are participating in the product, and without whom, the product would be worthless.
These days, the concept of crowdsourcing--defined by Jeff Howe, who literally wrote the book on the subject, as, "the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call"--is all the rage, and there are no end of well-known examples, especially on the Web: the Netflix prize; Twitter search; public tagging of Library of Congress archival photos; even Wikipedia. Indeed, much of the concept of user-generated content is really about crowdsourcing.
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