*supercollider

The last two weeks have seen the launch of GWAP (Games With a Purpose) and Noah Brier’s Brand Tags.

GWAP is a project by Carnegie Mellon which uses the results of your game playing to “help computers get smarter”, automatically refining their algorithms based on collective human input. Noah’s Brand Tags project aggregates our instinctual responses to brands, providing fascinating insights into our collective impressions of these brands as the output. Both remind me of the Free Rice game, which improves your vocabulary while serving ads which pay for rice donations to the UN.

All projects with very different goals, but what do they all have in common? Although only one is called GWAP, effectively they are all games with a purpose. They are all also great examples of other ways to better utilize our cognitive surplus, as so brilliantly explained in Clay Shirky’s recent talk at the Web 2.0 Expo.

As Clay points out: “the Internet connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.”

With the internet opening up all sorts of potential connections and opportunities for creation and interaction, how could we better use that time while still fulfilling the need to relax and stimulate ourselves?

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brand, games, utility