Use Google Moderator To Crowdsource Group Questions

Via Tech Crunch

by Michael Arrington on September 25, 2008

Google Moderator launched this evening, a simple tool that helps groups determine which questions should be asked at all hands meetings, conferences, Q&A sessions, etc. The idea is that there are always lots of good questions to ask in a limited period of time, but it’s hard to know which questions the attendees are most interested in hearing discussed. Moderator lets users add questions and vote on the questions of others, so the cream rises to the top.

Moderator was built by Taliver Heath as a side project and resides on Google App Engine. He describes the product on the Google App Engine blog:

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Wisdom of the Crowds Isn’t the Answer for Everything

Via Mashable

September 15, 2008 – 8:55 pm PDT – by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins 7 Comments

Last week, I wrote an editorial entitled “When it Comes to Politics, Don’t Listen to Me.”  It was fairly well recieved, at least by the contingent of Mashable readers who don’t tend to agree with me politically.  It struck on a number of themes and memes common to social media circles, though and my sentiments were echoed by none other than the inventor of the Web, Timothy Berners-Lee.

Stan wrote earlier this morning on what Berners-Lee told the BBC in an interview over the veracity of information on the Web:

Talking to BBC News Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was increasingly worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation…Sir Tim told BBC News that there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources.

Stan seemed to think that we as humans are capable of judging for ourselves whether or not information should be trusted or not simply based on the brands associated with the information we’re looking at. There are some serious problems with that assumption, but perhaps even more problematic was the dismissal provided by Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim today (emphasis added):

Do I have to keep repeating myself on this stuff? Why does the web need labeling? And, who’s to say which site is authoritative and which is not? Why can’t the web simply exist, grow, and morph into what masses decide? What happened to the “wisdom of crowds” deciding what’s credible?

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Ask500People Revamped for Better Crowdsourcing

Via Mashable

by Leslie Poston 3 Comments

I am all about applications and sites that tap into the power of the lazyweb, and Ask500People definitely falls into that category. We reviewed Ask500People when it launched, and over the past few months since then the company has gotten feedback from users on how to be a better resource. They seem to have taken those suggestions to heart, coming out with a long list of new features.

Admittedly, I am a Twitter junkie, and I do most of my crowdsourcing in real time via Twitter polling. I was convinced that I should give Ask500People a look, and can safely say that if nothing else it is a huge time sink. The dynamic visual results sucked me right in and cost me at least ten minutes – that’s a large time investment for my short attention span online, especially with something I’d never used before.

What’s changed since our last review? Ask500People is introducing demographic polling: poll for results by gender, age, location, team, education. That is huge, and definitely something you can’t do with a casual poll on Twitter. Knowing this level of details for an answer to your question is valuable information, and seeing it visually represented is even better.

The company will also be adding the ability to follow polls via a “favorite” system. This is handy if you want to track results over time. Coupled with the demographics and the new embed functionality, Ask500People should pick up a real presence in the online polling sector. Up until now, the fact that competitors like Twiigs and others have had embed capability from the start has put Ask500People at a disadvantage for getting noticed and used.

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