Tag Archives: digital labor
Michael S Hart: a man of many words
October 18, 2011… only was Project Gutenberg the first large-scale project to digitize books, it used distributed labor to do it.
Since 1981 Project Gutenberg has been run entirely by online volunteers (for the first 10 years, Hart apparently typed in every single book himself). Unlike Steve “control freak” Jobs, Michael Hart described himself as “not a very bossy boss”. To this day, the crowd (all 20,000 of them) is in control of pretty much everything at Gutenberg.org, from selecting and …
E-petitions: a vote for the future?
January 27, 2011… credit for trying, but why call on the crowd at all if you don’t listen when they answer?
Digital Debates
Given their track record, I couldn’t help feeling a little skeptical when I read the latest pledge by the same Conservative party: any e-petition with over 100,000 votes on the UK government website will be guaranteed a debate in Parliament. But since it’s a new year, I’m prepared to give the guys in suits another chance and take the idea seriously. It’s actually a …
Microtasking: Two hundred years later, the debate goes on
November 4, 2010… knows, around two hundred years ago Europe and America went industrial. A massive demand for cheap labor saw millions of people move to cities and into jobs in mills, mines and factories.
While the men were at the coalface, many women worked from home. Paid per item, homeworkers did a huge range of small, repetitive tasks, from sowing gloves to gluing cigarette tubes. Work was often minutely subdivided. A French survey from 1872 lists hat stitcher, hat dyer, hat ironer and hat trimmer …
Time for our next step
August 24, 2010… In our opinion, timing could not be better. Despite gloom in much of the economy, momentum in the digital work market is rapidly building. Several prominent start-ups have recently raised their first venture capital financing rounds, including CloudCrowd and Crowdflower.
Rather than view them as a threat, we believe these US based start-ups will help us to develop the global market (both in terms of supply of digital labor and demand for it). With the current momentum, we think 2011 …
Getting paid to party: what is the difference between work and play?
July 17, 2010… pay you money for? Not unless you are willing to say that housework, subsistence farming and slave labor are not work, but play. Unpaid work is often excluded from indicators such as GDP because of the practical difficulty of tracking it, but this is recognized as a shortcoming of the indicators. Work that is unpaid in one country is often part of the money economy in another, so payment would be a very arbitrary yardstick for work. Activities like casual gambling and taking part in a game …
Adam Smith, Crowdflower, EverQuest, games, gold farmers, Karl Marx, StarCraft, virtual currency, work | 6 Comments← Older posts Newer posts →
