Doctor: "How did you get here so fast?"
Patient: "Flu."
You create online content. Really. Even if you don't have a Facebook page, or a Twitter account, or a blog, you are creating content. Every time you buy (or don't buy) a book on Amazon, the order in which you watch videos on YouTube, the ads you click on in Yahoo's Sponsored Search. The searches you conduct on Google.
All of these things create content that influences the experience of other Internet users and helps us marketers make decisions.
Now your searches are helping schedule your kids' sick days. Google Flu Trends is a useful project that uses your search queries to predict flu trends by geography. The project correlates our search queries to flu activity based on historical data to predict future flu activity.
This use of "crowdsourcing" is one of the reasons I love my job. Consumer are producing content that is genuinely useful to other consumers and it doesn't take a minute of our time or a dime from our pockets. This project, I believe, fulfills the promise of Web 2.0-- it provides technology as an infrastructure and mines the collective data of the masses for the mutual benefit of all of us.
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