Facebook harnesses the crowd

From FastCompany.Com...

"Facebook's begun testing a system that's in vogue at the moment: Using its own users as a data-crunching system. Nothing terribly new there--except that Facebook's using its crowd to actually moderate the rest of the crowd and stamp out the nasty bits, which is a whole new ethically-intriguing level"

Read more here.

Trust and the Internet

The aim of the "TechnoCrowd" is to amass many different points of view and opinions into one space, giving readers/users the ability to parse that information for new concepts and ideas. However, with the freedom to express those opinions, it is the responsibility of the reader to decide what is true and what is false for themselves.

Sites like Wikipedia are populated by anyone with a computer, while the task of verifying that information falls upon everyone else. To assist with fact checking, researchers at UC Santa Cruz are developing a system to parse common sites, like Wikipedia, and color code information in such a way to give a trustworthiness measure based on the reliability of the person posting and the information itself.

Article: "Adding Trust to Wikipedia, and Beyond"