Easy! There are basically three ways to do it:

1) Browse by category: We assign posts to one or more categories, which can be searched in the middle column (as in the 1st picture below) or by clicking the desired category in the post itself (as in the 2nd picture).

2) Browse by tags: We also assign tags to each post, and there are usually more tags than categories because we want to make it easier for the reader to find related articles. The connection between articles with a given common tag can appear “soft”, but it reflects the way we like to navigate articles ourselves: many apparently unrelated subjects serve as useful building blocks/ models/ framings for another subject. You can find a tag cloud in the right column (1st picture below) or you can just click a tag in a given post to see other articles tagged with the same reference (2nd picture).

3) Search! There’s a search box in the top of the right column, as seen below.

Good searching! As always, if you’d like to comment on our categorization and tagging, or if you’d like to suggest changes and hopefully interesting articles, please send us an email!

The way MIT built its incentive system to recruit people to its “team” is part of the story, of course. They were clever enough to mix both “ego-boost” and “cold, hard cash” incentives (since they would donate some of the proceeds to charity). Other teams apparently had either just the feel-good or just the greedy incentives. Of course, the losing teams complain that they had been working for a while when the MIT Team came out of nowhere and, given the famous backers, got a lot of traditional press attention, giving them a leg up on recruiting “balloon spotters”. Well, it seems good media contacts do play a major role in this part of the challenge, so DARPA probably got a lesson from that as well.

Speculations abound on what DARPA could have learned from this, but whether this will help the US capture the “terrorist that can’t be named” is beyond our scope. What we’re interested in is the wealth of data on crowd-sourcing and information dissemination generated by this contest. We’ve posted before on the subject of Crowdsourcing and the implications on Media, Online Services, Search, Hyper-local advertising, Retailing, Services in general (links below). Here’s hoping the MIT Media Lab team will write a comprehensive paper on this challenge and shed some light on this trend.

LINKS:

With lure of cash, MIT wins Pentagon prize – NY Times (free registration required) on the contest winners – Dec. 6th ’09

“Crowdsourcing” revisited – Our own take on crowdsourcing and its potential shortcomings – Nov. 19th ’09

Netflix’s smart crowdsourcing initiative – Our take on the Netflix contest – Sept. 22nd ’09

MIT’s 2-day course on crowdsourcing – Classes in 2010 for this $2,600, 2-day course called Intelligent Organizations: Collaboration and the Future of Work.