Greetings! Firstly, I would like to give a warm welcome to everyone for dropping by my blog. For this week’s blog I will focusing on Harnessing Collective Intelligence.
What is “Harnessing Collective Intelligence”?
Everyone has their own personal way of explaining what is Harnessing Collective Intelligence. As for my way of describing it in short, is the use of networking by providing a platform for users to upload their content to share with other people. The more people that are sharing their content, more people will attracted and ultimately use that particular platform to share their content (and the cycle continues) which eventually will become more successful. Examples of existing platforms are Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest. This is my understanding based on an article that i have read by Tim O’Reilly. One of the examples for harnessing collective intelligence that will be discussed in this post is Imgur.
What is Imgur?
Imgur is pronounced image-er/imager. Imgur is used by variety of people that want to upload or share their photos with their friends and families without delay. It is a free image hosting site, also a major image hosting services for popular social media sites called Reddit. Imgur allows a number of people to access the site at once without crashing the website (capable of high traffic).
Comparing different platform with similar services?
Examples of similar platforms are Flickr and Instagram. Flickr is more used by photographers to share their own creation/photographs meanwhile images on imgur can be uploaded anonymously. Instagram allows users to follow other people or connect with friends that only allow to post pictures with photo filters provided, it also available through mobile devices and allow instagram to share through social media such as twitter and facebook, whereas Imgur is majorly used by Reddit.
How Imgur uses Harnessing Collective Intelligence?
Imgur allow users to upload meme, to view the stats, count the number of views per hour per day, the size of the image that being uploaded, add favorite, download the image and having more sharing options for users to use that can make it easier for them to find or some of the image they would want to share with. Aside from that, there are likes/dislike button if they find it amusing or unimpressive as well as comments are provided underneath the image for people to comment on.
Source:
Flickr. (2014). Flickr. Retrieved March 7, 2014 from
Instagram.(2014). Instagram. Retrieved March 7, 2014 from
Imgur. (2014). Imgur faq. Retrieved March 7, 2014 from
O’Reilly, T. (2006). Harnessing C0llective Intelligence. Retrieved March 7, 2014 from
http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/11/harnessing-collective-intellig.html
Reddit.(2014). Reddit. Retrieved March 7, 2014 from
DaisyCraazy's Blog 
Hey,
I really enjoyed reading it your blog entry about Harnessing Collective Intelligence.
I have used Reddit before and have visited imgur and didn’t like how the site is lay outed from high school.
After reading your blog, it made me give this site another go and realised how I see Imgur from when I judged from high school to try using it. It is simple to use and easy to grasp.
After reading, and notice you talking about how Imgur uses Harnessing Collective Intelligence, you may also like to mention about networking effects and how it have improved from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and how Harness Collective intelligence had brought opportunities compared to Web 1.0.
An example is from this blog written by a student in QUT from previous years:
http://sukshan.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/web-2-0-harnessing-collective-intelligence/
But again, I enjoyed reading this blog and is enjoyable to read and I hope to see more from you.
Nina Van
I found this blog post captivating, and relevant. You mentioned that Imgur is often used to link photos to Reddit. Would you say that the majority of users would use Imgur in this way and Reddit’s collective intelligence takes over, or that linking is more of a side feature, and the majority of users would browse and use Imgur to share and discover images?
Thank you for your blog post on Imgur. I believe one of the main reasons why Imgur is a great example of a platform that effectively harnesses collective intelligence is that it minimises the barriers of adoption.
Unlike other collective intelligence websites I have investigated this week, Imgur allows the user to upload images without being forced to first create an account. This allows the user to fulfil their primary purpose quickly and allows them to start adding value to the platform (Gregg, 2010).
These are all important concepts relating to collective intelligence. Without data (the images) and the ability for its users to easily add their own images, Imgur would not be as popular as it is.
One area Imgur could improve in relation to collective intelligence is the ability to award its contributors. Other web sites that harness collective intelligence such as Stack Overflow, provide gamification elements such as badges and reputation for user contributions (“Welcome to Stack Overflow”, n.d.). Offering these little incentives would help encourage members of the community to regularly contribute to the platform.
I am looking forward to your future blog posts. I will also be making Web 2.0 related posts in the future over on my blog which I hope you will consider checking out:
http://andrewsoden.wordpress.com/
References:
Gregg, D. (2010). Designing for collective intelligence. Communications of the ACM, 53, 134-138. doi: 10.1145/1721654.1721691
“Welcome to Stack Overflow”. (n.d.). Retrieved March 12, 2014 from: http://stackoverflow.com/about
Thank you Daisy for this great introduction to imgur. I have never heard of this website (my lack of knowledge), and I did make a visit skimming through the imgur site; the website looks great!
I read a post written by another student about Instagram, there were concerns of users uploading inappropriate contents and sharing it to underage users. Does imgur have some sort of filtering functionalities that tackles this concern?
Thank you for this informative article on Imgur. For uploading images to quickly share them with my friends, I personally use Puush as it allows users to capture the area on the screen that I want to share and the captured image will instantly be uploaded on Puush server and opened in a new tab of the browser. The reason I stopped using Imgur is because Imgur back then did not have this screen capturing function or maybe it always has had but I’ve never seen any function like this from Imgur. So my question is that, does Imgur ever have this kind of instant screen capturing function which then uploads the images on their hosting server for users to share them with their friends?
Nice work ! When talking about Imgur it is an image hosting and sharing service, from 2009 to 2013 it is popularity has been increased largely. Number of users who are using the site is going up day by day. As we all know the popularity has been increased because of new features that the founders have added to the site. And performance and availability increases the user attraction to the site
Imgur allows users to be active in the site implicitly and explicitly. It enhanced implicit user experience by adding new tool on 2013. It is called as mame generator, which offers simple mame creation experience to its users. This feature highly popular among users. Moreover Imgur has largely overtaken other hosts such as Photobucket , ImageShake and TinyPic. So peole can view the website through other popular social networks.
n9070508
Thank you to post this blog about Imgur, it looks like something different with Flickr and Instagram, but all of them are using harnessing collective theory to enhance the web or apps to be able to get higher performance by using some of way like rank post, comment, favorite and even sharing photo.