Scott Porad

I presented at Web 2.0 Expo NYC today.  For those of you in the audience who asked for my slides, they are embedded below.  (For those of you not in the audience, these probably won’t make any sense.)

I recently met Josh Knauer who is the founder of Rhiza Labs.  Rhiza has an amazing platform for rich data visualization, and one of their most well known products is FluTracker (http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com).

FluTracker is a user-generated mechanism for tracking outbreaks of the H1N1 virus across the country. If there is suspected case in your area, you can report it.  And, like any good UGC system, Josh’s team verifies the accuracy of the report before posting it.

Government data only tracks outbreaks down to the county level, but FluTracker allows it to be tracked down to a specific location on a map.  So, for example, I was able to see that there haven’t been any outbreaks in my neighborhood.

One of the key takeaways from this data that Josh has learned is that “airports are the new waterways”.  In other words, when disease virality was first researched in the 1800′s the conclusion was that diseases primarily traveled along waterways.  In modern times, diseases travel through airports.

That caused me to think this: most airports are operated by state or county governments, and it is mainly county health departments that are working to control the spread of disease.  Why don’t county health departments put hand sanitizer (i.e. Purell) at the airport?

If cruise ships have figured out that asking people to use hand sanitizer before they eat reduces illness, why can’t we do the same when we fly?  For instance, as part of going through security you could be asked to sanitize your hands.  I bet that would reduce the virality of disease dramatically.

Ben recently asked this question:

Consider Hollywood, where millions of struggling amateur writers are creating new shows and some get made, is that crowdsourcing? If not, what about American Idol?

I’ve addressed this question in some of the talks I’ve given on user-generated content.

The notion of crowdsourcing typically relies on the notion of receiving many individual inputs from the crowd with the average or sum of those inputs resulting, more often than not, in an accurate result.

In other words, when you break it down there are (at least) two key elements to crowdsourcing: 1) many inputs from the crowd, and 2) some sort of averaging or sum of inputs to yield a result.  With that in mind, I would answer Ben’s questions this way:

Hollywood is not crowdsourced.  There are many inputs (writers submitting scripts to studios).  But, the second criteria, of some sort of averaging or sum, is not met because in Hollywood there is a relatively small cabal of individuals who decide to “green light” a movie.

On the other hand, I would argue that American Idol is crowdsourced, but not in the way you think.  American Idol is like Hollywood in that it accepts many inputs (contestants), but those contestants are filtered from many to a final few by a small set of judges.  Unlike Hollywood, however, American Idol crowdsources the selection of the winner: many individuals (viewers) vote, and those votes are tallied to produce a winner.

When I talk about UGC, I make the point that American Idol is one instance of an interseting transformation in user-generated content which I call “user-driven” or “crowd-filtered” content.  In these new cases, the model has moved from relying on the crowd to source the content toward relying on the crowd to filter the content.

This is exceptionally valuable because user-generated content facilitators, like Cheezburger, can filter down large volumes of content to the submissions that are the most accurate (in this case, where accurate is what is satisfying to the audience).  In other words, crowd-filtering provides an averaging or summing mechanism for the types of things that cannot be averaged or summed.

Recently, I wrote two guest blog posts for Journalism 2.0, Mark Briggs’ project that explores the future of news journalism.

In the first, The Catch with User-Generated Content, I discuss the pitfall that many web sites make when they foray into UGC:

But there’s a catch: the important lesson from Cheezburger’s success with user-generated content is that while content costs less, it is not free. That is, even though we do not pay our users for the content they contribute, there is still a cost associated with acquiring and managing that content. Why? Because only a fraction of the content submitted to us is of high enough quality to be used.

As a result, we incur significant expense to sift and filter and sort through the submissions to find the best. Specifically, we employ a four-stage review process — two phases leverage the user community to help us filter content and two phases of review are done by moderators employed by our company.

In the second post, What can journalism learn from I Can Has Cheezburger?, I talk about how the introduction of UGC is shifting the role of a news reporter:

There is still value for news reporters and organizations to be “source leaders.” I am one who believes that there is an important role for the professional news reporter in our society. But it is clear to me that user-generated content or crowd-sourced information is a valuable addition to news journalism because it can yield more and better information, and often faster.

However, as I’ve illustrated, that information comes with a cost which is finding ways to separate the signal from the noise. The task news reporting has shifted toward filtering. My view is that winners in the Internet era of news journalism will be the people and companies who, like Cheezburger, ReadWriteWeb and Amazon, develop systematic ways of filtering the flood of user-generated content and sources down to those with the best content. The result will be higher quality news and information, that is more relevant and on target with the audience, at a lower cost.