Time to consider crowdsourcing

We all know about outsourcing, the ability to farm out work to people, often overseas, that will work for less, and sometimes for a lot less. But a not-so-new trend is changing the way that outsourcing happens, called crowdsourcing.

The idea is to take a job and divide it into small enough pieces that someone can do it quickly in their spare time. Think about transcribing an audio recording. Or Photoshopping a series of photographs. The difference between regular outsourcing and crowdsourcing is that you don’t necessarily know your contractors, and they mostly are here in the good ole U S of A. Think of it as stimulus package for our troubled times, but based entirely on the private sector.

The idea isn’t all that new, but is catching on due to some important trends. First off, there is a critical mass of people who are willing to do the work, and probably more people are going to be interested because of high unemployment over the past year. Second, the Internet-based tools that are used to farm out jobs and track completions and manage the crowds is getting better all the time. Broadband penetration helps: now most people don’t do dial-up, which is great if you are going to be online for hours at a time working the crowd-based tasks. Finally, many crowds have developed a solid track record, so it is more compelling for project managers looking for workers.

As a result, crowdsourcing is big business. There are several dozen firms that help organize the crowds of people that offer up their services, and some of them are making millions of dollars a year in fees that they collect from being brokers between buyer and provider. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and eLance.com are two of the more well-known ones, and if you want to find out others I suggest you first listen to my podcast with my partner Paul Gillin and Brent Frei, the author of one of the first industry reports on crowdsourcing. You can find the links to his report and our podcast if you go to: http://MediaBlather.com/103.html

Frei runs a company that provides crowdsourcing, so it isn’t too difficult to see his self-interest. But the report opened my eyes to see the power and the promise behind the idea. For example, you can leverage your own billable time by farming out tedious tasks to someone else that would gladly do it for a lot less than your rates. Or compiling a list of vendors by doing online research of their Web sites. With a $10/hour intern, this project would have taken 12 hours or $120 to complete the task. By divvying it up among a crowd, Frei was able to get it done for about $18 total.

Now, I know what you are going to say. How can you ensure quality of the crowd-based researchers? What about the time and cost to manage them? There are ways to build in redundancy and have the results cross-checked, and with the right kind of project management, you can piece things apart in such a way that makes sense for your crowd.

Paul and I have been doing our MediaBlather podcasts for several years, and always on the lookout for someone interesting to interview, particularly on social media and new marketing tools. If you are interested in being on our show, let us know.

Five steps towards making virtual desktops real (CIOupdate)

While the idea may not be on many IT radar screens yet, a few shops are beginning to implement these tools as a way of keeping their desktops inside the data center where they can be more readily managed, updated, and secured. The idea has some merit, particularly for those of us that began our computing careers in the mainframe era with 3270 terminals. But the road to total desktop virtualization isn’t easy, and can be overwhelming.

You can read my story that was posted this week to CIOupdate.com here.

How to make LinkedIn even better

LinkedIn has been busy in the past week, sprucing up their default members’ home page, linking with Twitter, and putting together a very belated effort at opening their service to programmers.

I like LinkedIn. I am spending more of my time using it to promote myself, to connect to people that I know, and to build up value for my community and myself. With the help of the local chamber of commerce, I now manage a group called the St. Louis Job Angels, where we have listed more than 80 different jobs over the past couple of months and more than 500 job seekers and recruiters have signed up to share tips and support each other’s efforts. So as a long-time frequent user, I offer some advice of where they should be going in 2010 – not that anyone will listen to my humble suggestions.

First off, they need to be more open. The add-on applications were a good first step (you can link up to your WordPress and TypePad blog entries, publish your slide decks via Slideshare, and others). And the developer network (developer.linkedin.com) is a good second step, but I want more. I would like to use my LinkedIn connections as my main contact manager, but until I can gain more control over this information it isn’t as useful as it could be. Why do I need to publish these Web Informant newsletters to a separate email listserv that I have to maintain with your current email addresses? Probably most of you subscribers also take the time and energy to maintain your current email address in LinkedIn, so why duplicate that effort? Well, because it is too hard to still setup groups and email selected contacts inside of LinkedIn.

Second, I want to be able to freely export my connections without having to resort to a third-party service. Right now, OpenXchange (ox.io) is the only way that I can extract my contacts. Yes, I can synch up my address books on any number of services (one that I have mentioned in the past is Glide, glidedigital.com) — but these are strictly a one-way operation, pouring data into LinkedIn. I don’t like using services that I can’t extract my data easily.

Third, scrap InMail. We don’t need another communication substitute for email or IM. Ditto for the LinkedIn toolbars for Outlook and the Web. My browser window is small enough without any more clutter.

Fourth, give me better and more discrete publishing tools for my groups, similar to the way the free Yahoo or Google Groups services operate. Right now, I can send messages to everyone, but only as the group manager. My group can’t easily communicate amongst themselves, without my intervention. Subgroups are a nightmare to deal with. There is no easy way to remind people that I have invited to the group (but haven’t accepted the invite). Can I get a URL that points directly to my group? Not easily. And so on. Any quick look at what Yahoo has been doing since they bought eGroups nearly ten years ago would show the way towards a truly useful service.

None of these suggestions would be difficult, or even time consuming to implement. And I am sure that there are plenty of other things that they have on their radar. Feel free to share your own on my strominator.com blog too.

Top500 news: The rise of the GPU

GPU, as in graphics processing unit, don’t get as much credit as CPUs, the supposed “brains” inside the PC. Well, that is slowly changing, particularly as people figure out that the modern GPUs have a lot of raw processing horsepower to more around all those pixels while you play your FPS games.

This week, the latest list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers was announced. What I find interesting about it is that at number 5 is a new Chinese design that marries Intel Xeon CPU chips with AMD/ATI graphics chips. There are thousands of  clusters that contain a pair of CPUs and GPUs connected via Infiniband switches. And perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that they built this hybrid design by underclocking the GPUs: the frequency of GPU core was decreased from 750MHz to 575MHz and the frequency of GPU’s memory was also decreased from 900MHz to 650MHz. Showing the power of gaming processors even further, six systems use IBMs advanced Sony PlayStation 3 Cell processor with 9 cores in their CPUs.

What is interesting about this announcement is that these supercomputers are built from yesterday’s technology: if you are going to assemble a machine based on thousands of chips, you need time to do the integration and the government purchasing. The Cell CPU is several years old. Just wait until the current crop of CPUs and GPUs enter this top500 list in the coming months: you are going to see a lot more hybrid combinations as this Chinese machine take over the top spots, just as the Intel and AMD CPU collections took over from the old fashioned custom mainframe-style supercomputers of our youth.