A programmers role in harnessing the wisdom of crowds
Nate Olson interviews Yaron Koren via email May 12-14, 2007
Yaron Koren is a freelance Web programmer based in Brooklyn. Two of his creations that work in tandem are Discourse DB and the Semantic Forms extension for MediaWiki, the same software that powers Wikipedia. Discourse DB is a wiki that organizes "the opinions of the world's journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues." It has a complex structure under the hood to map the "semantic" relationships of the data that users enter, but the most innovative feature of the site, the Semantic Forms extension, allows for a more intuitive user interface than most similar applications. Anyone can download it to use with a MediaWiki-based wiki.
Nate Olson: Do you consider "crowdsourcing" to be a distinct phenomenon? If so, how do you see it evolving over the next 1-2 years?
Yaron Koren: It's certainly not a new concept--there's been a lot of companies that have run contests to come up with advertising slogans and the like for a long time, for instance. But the Internet has obviously made it easier to do it. I don't personally see much change in the concept over the short term. Companies will try to tap more into crowdsourcing, but they'll discover--if they don't know it already, that is--that it's very hard to control your message if you're not working directly with the people making the content. On the other hand, the Threadless/Cafe Press model, where it's the crowd making the products themselves, seems to be doing quite well.
5/23/07
