Crowdsourcing lessons

The Nieman Journalism Lab website (the NLJ at Harvard "is an attempt to help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age") has an interesting article about lessons to be learned from the Guardian's successful use of crowdsourcing. "Crowdsourcing" is the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies on the internet. The Guardian used it after the UK Telegram had broken the story about politicians' expense accounts. The Guardian put all the raw public records of expense accounts up on their website - and invited the public to sort through them. The impressive result was the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent.