Crowdsourcing and processing articles
Crowd workers are not online Shakespeares, but Carnegie Mellon research shows they can write "(...) the research team led by Aniket Kittur, assistant professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), found that the crowdsourced articles compared favorably with articles written by a single author and with Simple English Wikipedia entries." Programming crowds "In the MIT researchers’ experiments, Soylent recruited turkers to perform two different tasks: one was to copyedit a document of roughly seven paragraphs; the other was to shorten a document. (...) the researchers found that $1.50 per paragraph would elicit good results within 20 minutes; the cost would go down to about 30 cents per paragraph if the user was willing to wait a couple hours." Mind you that the first research itself has a bit xkcd feel to it in the ingenious sense. These are milestones which are worth remembering, because it'll only get steeper in the coming years -...