 Crowdsourcing at Microsoft - Who Knew?
In preparation for a "crowdsourcing" panel I'm participating in at WebGuild's upcoming Web 2.0 Conference on January 29, I'm on the alert for stories/case studies about companies -- big and small -- that are using their "crowds" to outsource some of their day-to-day activities. To that end, I'm fortunate because we've covered a number of great crowdsourcing companies in our recent We Are Smarter Than Me book but new examples are cropping up literally every day.
One such example of crowdsourcing happened to me serendipitously yesterday and it came from a most surprising source i.e. Microsoft. Now I'll be the first to give Microsoft credit for making a big push into the new world of Web 2.0/social media but in general, they are still a bit kludgey (side note: I need to look up the spelling of the word "kludgey" and strangely enough, the first Google entry that popped up was called the "Microsoft Lexicon Center.")
So yesterday morning, I opened up my Outlook and was waiting for my e-mail to load. As I waited, a dialog box popped up with a list of about 100 words I had added over the last few months using the "Add to Dictionary" functionality and asked me if I was willing to participate in "Microsoft's efforts" to improve their spell check dictionary. Of course I couldn't resist participating in this little experiment so I took a look through the list of my "Add to Dictionary" words, cleaned up a few egregious errors (the editable list is a nice feature of this query) and hit "submit."
What impressed me about Microsoft's approach is that they made it easy for me to see the WIIFM ("what's in it for me") associated with their obvious "crowdsourcing" effort. By submitting my custom list of words, I had a better shot at words like "Twitter", "widgetize", "email" (without the dash) or even "crowdsourcing" being recognized as real words vs. flagged misspellings. While I won't pretend that my entire list will be incorporated, I do realize that if thousands or millions of other users submit similar words (which I assume they will), the "crowd" will start to drive faster vocabulary evolution within Microsoft's tools.
Do you know of a company that is doing a good job at "crowdsourcing?" If so, please Twitter me at @astrout or comment below.
Tue, Jan 22 2008 |
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