Oscar.howell/LOW types

From Technologies and Politics of Control
Revision as of 06:13, 8 April 2008 by Oscar.howell (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Back to Main Page

There is no exact definition as to what "Labor on the Web" (LOW) is. In the preceding slide a provisional definition is given. It is difficult to group the different kinds of LOW, but following the definition made in this presentation, we would like to group the instances of LOW in the following form:


  • Crowdcasting: A request is sent to a large community of users to solve a specific problem or perform a task. The community responds and performs the task, via a small group or a single person. Examples: Innovation by Lead Users, InnoCentive.


  • Crowdsourcing: It is the tapping of a community to obtain the performance of discrete jobs, that would otherwise have been outsourced in bulk to a single vendor. Examples: the Open Source Community, Goldcorp mining project, Texas border surveillance. ("Crowdsourcing" is a term that has been used broadly to cover many forms of business models, which may be misleading).


  • Artificial Artificial Intelligence: It is the integration of tasks performed by humans into a process performed by a computer algorithm. It derives its name from the fact that it is not another computer performing the task, but you can't know from the result (a kind of inverse Turing Test ) --- Examples: Amazon's Mechanical Turk, NASA Clickworkers program.


  • Assembled Distributed Computing: A Person makes their computational assets available to perform processing work coordinated by a third party. The accumulation of processing power enables projects to complete complex tasks or other. Examples: SETI@Home project, Meraki mesh networks.


  • Mass Collaboration: These projects are the ones that are widely known. A large group of online collaborators come together to perform a task that would have otherwise required a company to perform. Examples: Wikipedia.org, Apache Web Server Project, Gutenberg Project.


  • Avatar Agency: People that participate in the games and virtual worlds (MMORPGs) can organize and perform tasks within the environment. The tasks may vary from taking part in a battle as a mercenary to build a house.


  • "Buzz" Marketing: It is a method used to spread information regarding a product to a large audience using agents that do not reveal their identity. It takes the form of commisioned recommendations to affinity groups. It is regarded to infringe the ethical rules of maketing, like subliminal messages. Example: Facebook's Beacon System