May 19th, discussing lessons learned from researching prior art and copyright infractions, Would you hire a couple professionals or every single passionate amateur?

Next time you need to dig through a massive amount of publicly-available information to find prior art, research copyrights or patent filings, would you hire a) a team of experts or b) an intern and spend $1,000 on Mechanical Turk (or, more possibly, c) both)?

Or perhaps you’d choose a better strategy, d) dump all the information on your website and enlist tens of thousands of volunteers using a public, fun, fast, scalable system that creates a feedback-driven narrative?

That’s what the Guardian newspaper in the UK recently did to crowdsource their investigation into the recent scandal over MPs’ expenses (link via Ethan Bauley).

And people say the web is all just noisy chatter; done right, the unorganized mass of people can influence institutions with more power than ever before.

Professional journalism isn’t dead, and it never will be; it’s just a vastly different game. Ignore the new world at your peril.

Related: Alan Patrick, Expensesgate – a lesson for Governments thinking of Government 2.0.