Successful CrowdSourcing applications will require Reputation
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Today I was thinking about virtual marketplace applications that provide services to customers by farming out requests to helpers. This concept is known as CrowdSourcing and some examples might include things like Google Answers and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I expect the opportunities that exist for this style of application will grow in parallel with the growth of mash-up style applications on the web. The rise of mash-ups and the success of folksonomy-style activites such as tagging have created an environment where CrowdSourcing is growing as a business model.
One of the barriers that I see to the growth of this new business model is working out how to provide service level agreements (SLA's) for activities that are outsourced to groups of participants over the internet. I mean how do you start a business that relies on a crowd to be able to run - it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem in that until you have some inertia you may not be able to attract sufficient resources and you may not generate enough resources until you have a high enough profile.
So having an SLA which states that you can provide X within Y minutes or hours may be difficult.
Another barrier to the success of CrowdSourcing as a viable business model could be Reputation. I mean would you pay big bucks for a Ferrari if you knew that it may have been assembled and designed by rank amateurs? No, of course you wouldn't. The quality of an item is usually linked to its reputation in some way... and so it will be with knowledge that is served up by the crowd.
So it's probably timely that, in my thinking about these types of problems that there's currently a bit of a blogging discussion going on Microsoft's next community reputation initiative: Claimspace. Here's the thread as I've seen it so far:
Korby describes Claimspace
Ted Haeger asks whether we can trust Microsoft
Korby's reply to Ted's post
Reputation and Federated Reputation could certainly have a very significant role to play in the future, collaborative web, so conversations such as these fascinate me.
NOTE: I just realized that Korby linked to ProjectDistributor in his article about Claimspace... cool! 