DGTL12002 Week 4

The Sheep Market, while fundamentally useless, is an interesting and innovative example of crowdsourcing in terms of social media. The website was created by Aaron Koblin who challenged users to sketch him a picture of a sheep with absolutely no context as to why they were performing said task. The results were overwhelming with hundreds of entries submitted. So what’s to be learned from this rather pointless exercise? Well, at its very core, The Sheep Market shows us just what sorts of results crowdsourcing can have. Sure, no one has anything to gain from a series of crudely drawn sheep (unless your some sort of crudely drawn sheep enthusiast, in which case I’d suggest seeking help), but if these sorts of results can be achieved from such a pointless task as the one set by Koblin, just imagine what crowdsourcing could achieve when used for more practical purposes. The possibilities are almost endless.

References

The Sheep Market, 15 June 2013, http://www.thesheepmarket.com/