Joel Johnson on Gizmodo interviews the people behind 48Hrs Magazine which will be soon available for purchase. 48 Hour Magazine, Issue Zero began on May 7th where contributors had 24 hours to produce and submit their work and the next 24 hours were invested in editing and creating it. You can know more about the people (editors) involved with the project here, read the official blog or follow them on twitter.
Joel Johnson has tried to keep his conversation, in the spirit of the project to exactly 48 minutes and is an interesting one.
Joel Johnson – What’s the lesson of 48 Hour Magazine? Are you guys trying to show the big magazines something?
Sarah Rich (former senior editor at Dwell, co-founder of The Foodprint Project and co-author of Worldchanging) – I don’t know if I’d say we are trying to show the big magazines something so much as trying to demonstrate the potential to produce an excellent media product using "new tools"—meaning online collaboration, crowdsourcing, web-to-print production systems. I love traditional magazines; This isn’t an attempt to dig their grave, it’s just an example of the possibility of something new.
Mat Honan (Giz contributor and Wired contributing editor, who made Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle in four hours) – We’re not trying to show established magazines a way out of the wilderness, but I do think we all have aspirations to try to make something new and different work in terms of the way magazines can be produced and financed. We were all pretty inspired by MagCloud’s possibilities, and in particular Strange Light—the magazine Derek Powazek put together on the fly from the Australian dust storm. It was why we approached him before we got this off the ground and convinced him to come onboard. We thought that by using our networks on Twitter and Tumblr and that horrible piece of shit Facebook, we could likely get a lot of contributions in really quickly. And because it’s print-on-demand, we wouldn’t have to run around trying to find advertisers first, or figure out what our print run was going to be, or any of that other bullshit that traditionally makes launching a new title so cost-prohibitive.
“Crowdsourcing is a neologistic compound of "crowd" and "outsourcing" for the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call.For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data.The term has become popular with businesses, authors, and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms” - Wikipedia
Sara Huizenga (@socialsprouts) informs : Want to change the world but only have 99 cents? Armchair Revolutionary is here to help. Set to launch into beta on Tuesday, Armchair Revolutionary is a Web-based social activism platform designed to harness large-scale crowdsourcing and the boom in social gaming in a bid to support a wide variety of science and technology ventures that could benefit the world at large.
Started by the founders of The Hollywood Hill, said to be the largest social change membership organization in the entertainment-industry, Armchair Revolutionary is meant to bring people’s interest in helping support worthwhile causes and the iTunes-era simplicity of spending 99 cents on something intriguing together with innovators who need funding to get potentially world-changing projects off the ground.
Built around a series of eight social activism tasks–gifting, VoIP phone calling, e-mailing, uploading, downloading, voting, forms, and quizzes–Armchair Revolutionary is seen by its creators as a one-stop shop for today’s Web savvy and altruistic communities to make a big difference, one small step at a time.
Ariel Hauter, co-founder and President of Armchair Revolutionary writes on HBR blog on why 99 cents ?
In the run up to our beta-launch, we thought about many different payment models, but in the end, we’re going with what we think is a unique donor approach. We’re limiting financial gifts to 99¢ increments. We’re pretty optimistic that this somewhat counter-intuitive approach to fundraising is actually what’s needed.
Here’s why: The web is finally reaching a level of donation and payment scalability that micro-transactions can really add up. We’ve all witnessed the crowdsourcing fundraising successes of Moveon.org and the recent Haiti effort. Armchair Revolutionary takes this model to extremes, by limiting gifts to 99¢ per project (or project phase) for each user, thus reducing the risk-per-donor to a near-zero level per project. At this level, we’ve also eliminated any financial barriers to participants, tapping into a whole new marketplace for funding. It also supports a high-volume of projects per year as each donor is more capable of contributing to a full "portfolio" of projects as they roll-out per week. We anticipate scaling up from 20 projects in our first year to around 250 in the coming years.
Their press section informs that even being sitting on a chair they are truely revolutionary by being first in so many things:
The world’s first social activism website combining a micro-financing platform and one-click task technology (voip, email, upload, download, voting, forms, quizzes) to engage the public in supporting innovative science and technology projects.
The world’s first to combine social gaming with social activism for science and technology projects.
The world’s first website to offer the public the opportunity to help micro-finance for-profit social ventures (i.e. launch for-profit companies that provide social good). In most of these situations, Armchair Revolutionary will use the public’s contributions as investment capital and receive equity stakes in the start-ups it funds. As these equity stakes mature and come of value, Armchair Revolutionary may exit / cash-out and reallocate those profits to new social projects.
The world’s first social activism website to enable its users to personalize their public profiles with digital art produced by professional artists (ArmRev’s Visual Artist Program at http://www.armrev.org/artists)
SwiftRiver is a free and open source software platform that uses a combination of algorithms and crowdsourced interaction to validate and filter news. It is an open source initiative supported by many contributing people and organizations including Meedan, Appfrica, GeoCommons and Ushahidi :
User-generated content is becoming an increasingly important source of information during emergency events while traditional media continues to play a pivotal role in documenting events as they unfold. These trends are expected to continue well into the future. The challenge, then, becomes filtering this growing torrent of information. There is an apparent tradeoff between crowdsourcing (opening the floodgates) and validation (the filter). One of the strengths of crowdsourcing is the ability to collect a high volume of information from highly diverse channels like Twitter, email, news sites, blogs, and SMS.
Swift acts as the verifying filter for these different channels and is possible precisely because of the volume of information available from these sources. The more information generated, the more the community interacts with it, and the easier it becomes to identify mutually trusted sources.
"Kevin Kelly writes that researchers at the Social Computing Lab at HP Labs in Palo Alto have found that social media content can predict real world outcomes. In their study, the researchers built a model that used chatter from Twitter to predict accurately the box-office revenues of upcoming movies weeks before the movies were released. When the sentiment of the tweet was factored in (how favorable it was toward the new movie), the prediction was even more exact. To quantify the sentiments in 3 million tweets, the team used anonymous workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to rate a sample of tweets, and then trained an algorithmic classifier to derive a rating for the rest. But predicting box office receipts may be only the beginning. ‘This method can be extended to a large panoply of topics [PDF], ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election outcomes,’ the researchers write. ‘At a deeper level, this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.’"
The HP’s Social Computing Lab focuses on methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of groups of people in order to realize greater value from the interaction between users and information. Their research includes collective intelligence (“wisdom of the crowd”), incentive design for accessing resources, social networks and their implications for information dissemination and collective attention.
Galaxy Zoo, where you can help astronomers explore the Universe:
The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes — a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer.
More than 150,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo so far, producing a wealth of valuable data and sending telescopes on Earth and in space chasing after their discoveries. Zoo 2 focuses on the nearest, brightest and most beautiful galaxies, so to begin exploring the Universe, click the ‘How To Take Part’ link above, or read ‘The Story So Far’ to find out what Galaxy Zoo has achieved to date.
Joel Johnson – What’s the lesson of 48 Hour Magazine? Are you guys trying to show the big magazines something?
Galaxy Zoo