NASA invites you to Be A Martian [more inside]
posted by him on Nov 19, 2009 - 19 comments

He wasn't even supposed to perform, but when Michael Jackson took the stage solo at the Motown 25 in 1983, magic. Billie Jean. The moonwalk. The glove. It was one of those moments to remember. So a few years ago a coupla data dancers started The White Glove Tracking Project to commemorate the performance by analyzing the height and size of MJ's iconic white glove throughout, crowdsourcing the project frame by frame for 10,060 frames. Now the dataset is complete, and the Proce55ed magic is thrilling:
Slinky (75mb QT), Stretchy (45mb QT), and Shapely (33mb QT) by MeFi's own James Seo
Speed=Height (QT) by Zach Lieberman
Giant White Glove by Tim Knapen
and more in the gallery.
posted by carsonb on Oct 9, 2009 - 28 comments

The winners of the prize - for software 10% better at recommending movies than Netflix own Cinemax - were a team described here back in June. They beat another team by getting their results in 20 minutes earlier. Netflix was happy: “You look at the cumulative hours and you’re getting Ph.D.’s for a dollar an hour.” - so happy they're offering two new $half-million prizes.

No mention yet whether there's been any progress on the "Napolean Dynamite problem" ... the movies it's hard to predict your reaction to.

When Bertoni showed me a list of his 25 most-difficult-to-predict movies, I noticed they were all similar in some way to “Napoleon Dynamite” — culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify, including “I Heart Huckabees,” “Lost in Translation,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Sideways.”

posted by Twang on Sep 22, 2009 - 97 comments

Kill or cure: making sense of the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it. Paul Battley uses automation and crowd-sourcing in the war against bad science reporting.
posted by fatllama on Aug 31, 2009 - 27 comments

Crowd surf, crowd sourcing, crowd funding? Like being supported by an ocean of people, or collaboration from around the world, crowd funding gets projects financial backing from the people. It's not new, as it has been the method for funding charities and political campaigns for a very long time, but it is a novel attempt at getting funds for other projects. Some people have placed their hopes in crowdfunding as a way to save journalism, while other companies are looking to get micropayment-scale public investments in fashion by offering investors the potential for a cut of future profits. The more typical return is physical goods, like getting the t-shirt you help sponsor [via mefi projects], or a limited edition version of the album. There's another site long these lines, but more free-form in structure: Kickstarter, crowdfunding for people who make stuff. [via mefi projects] The fundees can set a fundraising goal, deadline, and a set of rewards for backers. If the goal's reached by the deadline, then everyone's charged and backers get their goodies. If not, nobody's charged. The previously discussed 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Kind of Bloop was funded this way.
posted by filthy light thief on May 20, 2009 - 7 comments

A startup is proposing a new model for harnessing the power of the web for activism that gets results: bite sized actions, under written by corporate sponsors.
posted by Bango Skank on Mar 3, 2009 - 37 comments

Forbes magazine runs an article promoting Crowdspring, the "design crowdsourcing" website, and calls professional design "snooty". Professional designers go absolutely crazy.
posted by WPW on Feb 4, 2009 - 109 comments

"The Mass Observation movement was founded by a group of 1930s' British intellectuals who believed the most revealing way to document an event was to document the peripheral activities surrounding it. The Mass Observers carried out their greatest project on May 12th, 1937, when they dispatched more than 200 observers throughout London to monitor the coronation of King George VI." This coming Tuesday, the folks at Januarythe20th.com are attempting to create a day of Mass Observation in the United States.
posted by TheWash on Jan 16, 2009 - 18 comments

the first full release of Photosynth. Stonehenge. Venice. Previously 1,2,3. PC only.
posted by signal on Aug 23, 2008 - 65 comments

FaceStat, a new startup from crowdsourcing consultants at Delores Labs bills itself as "market research for the individual." You upload a photo of yourself, and "within a couple hours, you will have detailed statistics about how people feel about the picture you provide." Oh, and it's powered by creepers like you, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (previously posted about here). [more inside]
posted by thisjax on May 7, 2008 - 37 comments

Biographicon : crowd-sourcing non-notables.
posted by stbalbach on Apr 1, 2008 - 7 comments

The White Glove Tracking Project is to Michael Jackson's white glove as Distributed Proofreading is to books. (Partially inspired by the Clickworks Project and the work of artist Paul Pfeiffer)
posted by gwint on May 2, 2007 - 9 comments

Crowdsourcing is the hottest way for companies to get a lot of content for not a lot of effort. From spaceships to t-shirts to iconic characters to lunar landers (via) to the latest entry, open source with money.
posted by Isabeau Sahen on Jul 5, 2006 - 29 comments

Have you told the powers in Washington what kind of world you want? You're busy. You don't have time to be a professional "Congress watcher." So we'll be your eyes and ears. We'll track the debates and compromises and bills that will shape the world.
posted by katy_ on Sep 3, 2002 - 16 comments