The UK has the dubious honour of being one of the most watched places in the world thanks to the vast number of CCTV cameras that keep an eye on public spaces 24 hours a day. In 2002 it was estimated that there were 4.2 million of these cameras nationwide and a member of the public could expect to be recorded up to 300 times in one day.
While many of these cameras are privately owned, some offer public online feeds. Now the BBC is crowdsourcing a directory of publicly viewable CCTV.
The producers of current BBC2 series Who’s Watching You? have created a map that aims to link to every CCTV camera in the country with an online feed. The public is being encouraged to submit details of any that are currently missing.
The map is still quite sparsely populated at present, with the BBC’s own webcams making up the bulk of submissions. As an almost-live view of everyday British life there are a few gems though. One camera is trained on the famous zebra crossing on London’s Abbey Road, updating every second. It’s frequent enough to get flavour for life in an upmarket part of the capital. Mountaintop views and the Brighton seafront are also just a click away.
What’s clear from the map as it stands though is that public camera feeds are generally useless as a surveilance tool. Most of them refesh every few minutes and aren’t close enough to street level to identify individuals. It’s the ones that don’t have online feeds that the British public should be concerned about.
As Mike Rubin, Series Producer for Who’s Watching You?says “The official figures suggest that there are around 30,000 CCTV cameras operated by public authorities. Beyond that, there are hundreds of thousands – and almost certainly millions – of private CCTV cameras”.
In an increasingly noisy world, designing buildings to be pleasing to our ears as well as our eyes is becoming more important. After all, buildings that are better at keeping out external noise and don’t suffer nasty echos will be more pleasant to be in. A new project is aiming to help make this process a lot easier.
Sound Around You, an initiative by the University of Salford, aims to crowdsource information about sound levels around the world using a simple mobile app and some desktop analysis software. The project’s website allows you to explore and listen to all uploaded recordings via a Google Maps mashup.
The mobile software is J2ME based which means it will work with most phones that aren’t the iPhone, while the desktop software is Windows only. Apple fans will have to sit tight on this one for the time being but an iPhone version is planned.
In this video the man behind the project, Charlie Mydlarz, explains how it works and why it’s an important project.
Since most of our editors aren’t native English speakers, we’ve been obsessed with spelling and grammar. Every time we hit the publish button, we secretly hope no errors have slipped in. Next to being really careful, this fear also translated in some posts about 2.0 spelling tools. Like Spellr.us, an Australia-based service that remotely monitors your blog or website and send you updates when it finds errors and typos. They launched at TechCrunch 50.
Last week, long time Next Web reader Bob Boynton sent me a tool that has a new and effective approach to this spelling problem. GooseGrade crowdsources copyediting to readers. That’s right, everybody can easily correct grammar, spelling, factual, or style errors. Isn’t that a great idea?
Every time a reader corrects something, the GooseGrade of a post drops a bit and the GooseGrade of the part-time copy editor increases. Founder John Brooks Pounders told Cnet how it works:
“GooseGrade does rate the ‘crowd.’ Each user has an accuracy rating for how often their corrections are accepted. We find this by dividing corrections accepted by total corrections posted. This should help keep spamming at bay and also provide an easy way for the author to know whether or not to listen to the grader. ex. ‘joewxboy is correct 95% of the time.’”
Here’s a video about GooseGrade:
The service will launch next week in private beta. I’ll definitely install it on The Next Web Blog, which seems to be a matter of just inserting a few lines of code. Then I’ll invite you, dear reader, to act like a copy editor every once in a while.
RYZ is a Portland, OR-based shoe fashion brand that is trying to make a name for itself by not focusing on attracting customers in the traditional sense, but rather setting up partnerships with people to create a win-win situation. The concept of user-generated designing processes is pretty known to most of us, but hasn’t yet been applied to shoe fashion yet, as far as I can tell, in the way RYZ is doing.
Rather than dictating what’s cool or not, RYZ allows anyone to design their own shoes, based on a number of templates. A creative panel is standing by to assist you if you need help. Other people get to vote up design results, and if you’re the ‘winner’, you receive $1000 + $1 for every pair that’s sold through their shop. The shoes aren’t all that expensive, and most of them look great, but you should note that they’re largely sold in limited quantities, so speed is key. The site was officially launched in beta a little over a month ago.
RYZ is very reminiscent of Threadless in its approach but I think it’s the first one that leverages crowdsourcing for shoes in particular. Unless you’ve heard of others?
Crowdsourcing is all about diversity. That’s the new message of Jeff Howe, contributing editor at Wired and an absolute hero for all the crowdsourcing experts. His upcoming book, “Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business” is getting him some speaking gigs and for some he even has to cross the ocean. I was present at one of these occasions and saw the inspiring man speaking at SocialStrategyTalk, a new Amsterdam-based speakers event about the social web organized by Sogeti and CreativeCrowds. Howe used to show graphs to prove the power of crowdsourcing – “a stock photo used to cost $300, now only $1″ -, yet he feels this diminishes the power of people. “The term crowdsourcing is misleading, as it sounds like it’s all about a crowd. But this is not how it works”.
It seemed like Howe was a little fed up with telling the same story over and over. Also, he probably felt that some people were running away with the definition of crowdsourcing, giving it their own twist. The result was a 45-minute presentation about special people who can be seen as an example for the beauty of crowdsourcing. Howe: “I Love my people”.
Ever since Howe saw the first signs of the phenomenon later called crowdsourcing, it was about real and special people for him. When he was writing about the music industry, Howe was hanging out with some little rock kids, “a mess of bad creativity, but fun”. He noticed an attitude change. Young people used to say “I wanna make movies”, they now say “Let’s make a cool movie”. With the rise of MySpace, kids started creating their own quality content. Then Converse started its DIY campaign, asking consumers to create an ad for the Chuck Taylor brand. This turned out to be a real hit, which got Howe really excited. “It was full in my nostrils, I could feel this was an article“.
When Howe started looking for crowdsourcing examples, he found great people. Like Nick and Jake, two college drop-outs from Chicago who are avid designers and active members of a t-shirt design culture. In 2000, they started an online weekly t-shirt design competition called Threadless. Contestants could win their own shirt, and everybody else in the community would wear it. This community steadily grew and went viral at some point. Now it’s a profitable company selling 90.000 shirts a month. Most important thing: the users still decide which shirt will be printed. The result? They’ve never not sold out a t-shirt. By letting the community members vote, the selection process is fine tuned to perfection.
If the story of Threadless already amazes you, you’d better hold on to yourself. As Howe summed up some more stunning examples of the power of crowdsourcing. (more…)
Written on 1st June 2009
0 COMMENTS 
The UK has the dubious honour of being one of the most watched places in the world thanks to the vast number of CCTV cameras that keep an eye on public spaces 24 hours a day. In 2002 it was estimated that there were 4.2 million of these cameras nationwide and a member of the public could expect to be recorded up to 300 times in one day.
In an increasingly noisy world, designing buildings to be pleasing to our ears as well as our eyes is becoming more important. After all, buildings that are better at keeping out external noise and don’t suffer nasty echos will be more pleasant to be in. A new project is aiming to help make this process a lot easier.
Written on 28th September 2008
Written on 30th July 2008
RYZ
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
