Collective Intelligence

Internet sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Amazon are all websites that I use on a daily basis and so do many of my friends. These websites are all types of collective intelligence. It is not something that they are well known as because no one thinks of what they are underneath their name and what is actually happening. I use websites like amazon to search for products to buy but never think about what is going on to create this website. Amazon has thousands of different online stores selling things on it, so if you were so search for one product you would be shown a huge list of different online stores that you can purchase that product from.

Something that I found that amazon also offers is the Amazon Turk. The Amazon Turk is a crowd surfing marketplace, which could be seen as a bit like Wikipedia. Amazon Turk has a computer programmers known as requesters who co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks. This is something that I found very interesting and in my workshop time I looked more into what happens.

I found that the requesters post HTI’s (human intelligence tasks). These tasks could be things as simple as picking the best photo out of several.

One of the most popular tasks I found that has been posted was the sheep market. It is collection of 10.000 sheep. They were all collected over a period of 40 days. He people who drew the sheep were just random people on the Internet. You can see on the sheep market website information about how much the workers were paid and what the average time spent on creating a sheep was.

This is a type of collective intelligence because people from all over the world have come to one website and created something incredibly random.

When finding information about this I found that I was able to relate this to other websites such as Facebook and MySpace as they are also a type of collective intelligence. When I log into my Facebook account I can immediately connect with people all over the world and this is the same for everyone. People use these websites to share photos and videos and all sorts of information. They also use it for arranging things and just generally keeping in contact with people.

From learning about collective intelligence it has made me open my eyes and realize how easy it is to connect with people in the simplest of ways. I have also been able to find out that there are hundreds more websites like the amazon mechanical turk when you can complete the simplest of tasks. Even though you may only be paid a small amount it just shows how people can come together and create something amazing.

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