Eric Blattberg, in his article The five crowdsourcing categories ranked: Popularity in social media gives us an analysis of how these 5 crowdsourcing categories ranked last year: cloud labor, crowd creativity, crowdfunding, distributed knowledge and open innovation. Here are the main results:
What do the world’s social media users think about crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing.org partnered with KL Communications to find out.
Together we tried to get a sense of how the world is feeling about the different forms of crowdsourcing using something called sentiment analysis. You’ve probably seen stories in the news recently that try to gauge the mood of certain groups or entire social networks like Twitter using sentiment analysis.
[…] Using a tool called Netbase, which indexes and analyzes millions of conversations across the web, Crowdsourcing.org and KLC analyzed data for the top 15 sites generating the most buzz for each of the five main crowdsourcing categories in Crowdsourcing.org’s Directory […] This report examines a year of data — timeframe: November 1, 2010 to October 31, 2011 — garnered from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, news sites and consumer reviews.
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EMOTIONAL SENTIMENT
Although the set of sites analyzed in the distributed knowledge category generated the most buzz, the posts that reference them are consistently the most pessimistic: over 27% of opinionated comments about distributed knowledge are negative in nature. Conversely, comments referencing open innovation and crowdfunding sites carry the highest positive sentiment of the bunch — 91.4% and 91.1% respectively — while posts about crowd creativity and cloud labor platforms fall somewhere in the middle.
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NORMALIZED BUZZ
As any half-decent media interpreter knows, “absolute buzz” is only one part of the equation. What’s trending, also referred to as “normalized buzz,” is equally significant. During the November 2010 to October 2011 timeframe, references to crowd creativity and cloud labor skyrocketed. Distributed knowledge, the most popular category in terms of absolute buzz, saw very slight gains over the course of the year. Crowdfunding references stayed relatively steady, while discussion of open innovation platforms plummeted throughout 2011.