While NASA is doing great in web 1.0, their communities seem to be for either kids or professionals. However, Planet Hunting asks for help from anybody to assist scientists to analyze large data sets of faraway stars using data from NASA. It is all about utilizing human's eyes ability to identify patterns of bright spots of stars that is more precise than computers algorithms! In addition to contributing to the research, individuals like me have profiles of stars or planets they have discovered and are able to engage in an active community in the same way we do with other social network sites.
Although you may not be interested in hunting planets, I wanted to share this with you to see how clever it was to apply the philosophy of Web 2.0 in collecting data for research. According to Dr. Dennen, this phenomenon is called "crowdsourcing".
That's a pretty cool idea. The tern we would use for this phenomenon (channeling all users) is crowdsourcing.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of some earlier thing you could sign up for to allow your computer, when idle, to help in the search for life beyond earth.
Your comment was helpful. I dded a link to Wikipedia to define "crowdsourcing" to my post.
ReplyDeleteThank you!