Working The Crowd

Engaging with social media such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter is now a key part of global business communications. Blogs, microblogs, social networking and social news sites have become the new tools for effective marketing and sales. This book is an excellent resource for anyone planning a social media strategy or individual campaign. It includes: specific sites and blogs for various types of networking; creating a social media brand and reputation; legal issues; future predictions.

Engaging with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs and social news sites is now a key part of global business communications. This book is an excellent resource for anyone planning a social media strategy or individual campaign . The new edition covers the latest thinking, practices and technology such as Google+.

The digital revolution is interwoven with the promise to empower the user. Yet, the rise of centralized, commercial platforms for crowdsourced work questions the validity of this narrative. In Crowd-Design, Florian Alexander Schmidt analyses the workings and the rhetoric of crowdsourced work platforms by comparing the way they address the masses today with historic notions of the crowd. The utopian concepts of early online collaboration are taken as a vantage point from which to view and critique current and, at times, dystopian applications of crowdsourced work. The study is focused on the crowdsourcing of design tasks, but these specific applications are used to examine the design of the more general mechanisms employed by the platform providers to motivate and control the crowds. Crowd-Design is as much about the crowdsourcing of design as it is about the design of crowdsourcing.

Explains what happened to music—for both artists and fans—when music went online. Playing to the Crowd explores and explains how the rise of digital communication platforms has transformed artist-fan relationships into something closer to friendship or family. Through in-depth interviews with musicians such as Billy Bragg and Richie Hawtin, as well as members of the Cure, UB40, and Throwing Muses, Baym reveals how new media has facilitated these connections through the active, and often required, participation of the artists and their devoted, digital fan base. Before the rise of social sharing and user-generated content, fans were mostly seen as an undifferentiated and unidentifiable mass, often mediated through record labels and the press. However, in today’s networked era, musicians and fans have built more active relationships through social media, fan sites, and artist sites, giving fans a new sense of intimacy and offering artists unparalleled information about their audiences. However, this comes at a price. For audiences, meeting their heroes can kill the mystique. And for artists, maintaining active relationships with so many people can be both personally and financially draining, as well as extremely labor intensive. Drawing on her own rich history as an active and deeply connected music fan, Baym offers an entirely new approach to media culture, arguing that the work musicians put in to create and maintain these intimate relationships reflect the demands of the gig economy, one which requires resources and strategies that we must all come to recognize and appreciate.

A career-spanning anthology of essays on politics and culture by the best-selling author of The Flamethrowers includes entries discussing a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal Baja Peninsula motorcycle race, and the 1970s Fiat factory wildcat strikes.

As the outcome of the Dagstuhl Seminar 15481 on Crowdsourcing and Human-Centered Experiments, this book is a primer for computer science researchers who intend to use crowdsourcing technology for human centered experiments. The focus of this Dagstuhl seminar, held in Dagstuhl Castle in November 2015, was to discuss experiences and methodological considerations when using crowdsourcing platforms to run human-centered experiments to test the effectiveness of visual representations. The inspiring Dagstuhl atmosphere fostered discussions and brought together researchers from different research directions. The papers provide information on crowdsourcing technology and experimental methodologies, comparisons between crowdsourcing and lab experiments, the use of crowdsourcing for visualisation, psychology, QoE and HCI empirical studies, and finally the nature of crowdworkers and their work, their motivation and demographic background, as well as the relationships among people forming the crowdsourcing community.

Its scale, flexibility, cost effectiveness, and fast turnaround are just a few reasons why crowdsourced testing has received so much attention lately. While there are a few online resources that explain what crowdsourced testing is all about, there's been a need for a book that covers best practices, case studies, and the future of this technique. Filling this need, Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd in Software Testing shows you how to leverage the wisdom of the crowd in your software testing process. Its comprehensive coverage includes the history of crowdsourcing and crowdsourced testing, implementation practices, and future trends. The book discusses best practices in implementation-explaining what, when, and how to crowdsource in a testing effort. It also includes case studies that illustrate how both product and service companies have successfully applied crowdsourcing in their testing programs. Explaining how to use the combined advantages of crowdsourcing and cloud computing for software testing, the book examines various engagement models in which you could implement crowdsourced testing. It addresses effective defect management in crowdsourced testing and considers both the business and engineering aspects of crowdsourced testing. The book explores the challenges, limitations, and situations when crowdsourced testing will not work and provides powerful best practices for mitigating the constraints and challenges, including how to build a crowdsourcing platform to test software products. Covering career opportunities for crowd testers, the book concludes by taking a look at the need to build a crowdsourced testing ecosystem, who the players of such an ecosystem would be, and who would need to champion such an effort.