Crowdsourcing Bush False Statements

The crowdsorucing concept has to spread into other realms of information identification and social community on the internet. This time it is being used by journalists to dig deeper and track information further than just the day-to-day, as it happens nature of hot-press journalism.

According to the research web site The War Card, Bush and his administration carefully orchestrated a misinformation campaign to mislead the public and drive America into a war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

To account for this The Center for Public Integrity, an organization dedicated to investigative journalism along with Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith has set up a database of words to track Bush Administration misinformation. For two years following 9/11, their data tracking shows, four administration officials: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld made 935 false statements about national security threats.

Of course, we all know the biggest false statement by the President regarded the "weapons of mass destruction" the administration asserted that it knew Iraq had and that these words became the primary motivation for the invasion of Iraq. In fact, by their own later admissions, they did not know and according to American forces on the ground, intelligence, and UN inspectors there was no WMD. But that Lie (is lie too strong a word - is it lying if you really believe it yourself as George Costanza on Seinfeld would say) was only the beginning. The administration went on to make what it knew were false statements to the American public and world bodies.

We know that then Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U.N. with carefully orchestrated (by Cheney's office) misinformation that the White House later blamed on faulty intelligence by the CIA. This carefully orchestrated misapplication of facts became the rational for the world that the American government gave for using force against Iraq and moving beyond U.N imposed inspections and sanctions.

You may search the database of 380,000 Iraq-related public pronouncements by top Bush administration officials here:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/

Crowdsourcing American History

Recently the U.S. Library of Congress posted over 3,000 non-copyrighted images from its collection to the popular photo-sharing web service Flickr. According to a statement on the LOC's web site, the reason for uploading is ""enhance our metadata."

Crowdsourcing, following on from social networking concepts like wiki communities, has become the latest phenomenon in web-based knowledge sharing computing. According the the LOC crowdsourcing is working.

By this method the national resource for images and history wants to improve the information attached to the photos, for the benefit of historical researchers and cultural posterity. The LOC figures if they throw the images out into the big wide electronic cloud hovering about us all, viewers will step up and offer particular knowledge about the people, the locations and the moment captured in those images.

"We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves," the LOC web post explains. "For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured."

To visit the LOC Photo set on Flickr go to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress