The Queensland floods crisis has seen a rush of people take to Twitter, local and remote, attempting to spread helpful information, writes Crikey intern Liam Mannix.
Crowdsourcing
A first for Aussie crowd-funded journalism
A story on chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers is the first YouCommNews — an initiative to crowd-fund journalism — story to be published today. But many pitches still wait with thousands of funding dollars still needed for the story to get written.
Citizen journalism is dead, long live crowdsourcing
Citizen journalism is dead, delegates to the Future of Crowdsourcing Summit were told yesterday. But the new tools for crowdsourcing remain an exciting opportunity for journalism.
Design your own Penguin covers for readers in the past
It’s Penguin’s 75th birthday, and to celebrate, they’re asking people to design their own Penguin covers with messages to the past, then share them with the rest of the internet.
TechCrunch crowdsources hacker revenge
Tech news site TechCrunch was hacked earlier this year, and police have finally found the culprit. So should it press charges? The site is letting readers decide.
Inside the Guardian‘s editorial election meeting
The UK’s Guardian appears to be crowdsourcing everything these days, but it has gone one step further: giving readers a say in its election lead line. Go inside the ensuing editorial meeting for a rare peek at how the news narrative is created.
Barbie goes geeky
Female geeks from all over the world united to vote in a campaign by Mattel to let fans choose Barbie’s next career move. The result? Babs is now a computer engineer.
Just how big is the Facebook economy?
Investors are putting more and more money into businesses building Facebook games, apps and services, and the Guardian wants to know just how much: is Facebook the next big economy, or a bubble waiting to burst? Help them find out.
Crowd-funded journalism
Journalist Paige Williams had a great yarn about a redneck-turned-rocket-scientist-turned-environmentalist, but every magazine in the country rejected it. So she put it up free online, and asked people to pay as they saw fit. So far, she’s earned $1500.
Climategate: The Book, written by you
The Guardian is taking crowd-sourcing to a new level: publishing the manuscript for its new book about the hacked climate change emails and asking readers to help write, edit and “peer review” the tome. Great idea or total gimmick?
How I ended up running a $100,000 marketing campaign
The latest Aussie snack food to jump on the “name our new product” bandwagon is SupaShake. 20-year-old marketing blogger Zac Martin explains how he has ended up running the $100k campaign for one of the new flavours.
Competitions are great for companies. Just ask Netflix.
Netflix now has a winner in its much publicised contest to award $1 million to anyone who could improve its movie recommendation algorithm. The crowdsourcing competition is a great business model, says Daniel Indiviglio.
Gawker translate censored story into Russian
Outraged at revelations that GQ buried a story linking Vladimir Putin to a series of 1999 bombings to keep it out of Russia, Gawker has rallied its readership to translate the article into Russian and spread it online.
65 toppings, one pizza
The lovely story of how a simple mathematical question about pizza topping combinations on social news site Reddit led the site’s users to create a 24” pizza with 65 toppings.
Lessons from Guardian‘s people power test
The MP expenses scandal was a big story to cover. How’d The Guardiancope? By putting the public-records dump online and asking readers to sift. Brilliant, says Michael Anderson.
Guardian harnesses people power for MP expenses investigation
Almost 20,000 have answered The Guardian’s call for a hand to sort through the 457,153 pages of British MP expense claims.
