The Internet was born in 1969, the year Neil Armstrong first landed on the Moon. On the Internet’s 40th anniversary, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) posed a challenge. They deployed ten red weather balloons in ten undisclosed locations across the continental US. The first team to correctly identify the locations of all ten would win a $40,000 prize. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) won in less than nine hours; runners-up found fewer than ten balloons.

This article describes the methods--crowdsourcing and social media--used by those teams. It highlights how, in this Web 2.0 Internet world, we discover, report, analyze, and utilize information, often in the blink of an eye.

Jeff Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing” in 2006. Usually, when you have a problem, you can outsource it to an expert or a suitable company for solutions. Crowdsourcing means that you outsource a problem to the Internet. The collective wisdom of a vast number of Internet users (nearly two billion) may make solving the problem easier.

Another trend in the technology world is the popularity of social networks. The rise of Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter reveal the possibility of using the moods and/or thoughts of a crowd.

The red balloon challenge aimed to test the limits of information discovery and dissemination on the Internet. The fact that the MIT team discovered the ten balloons in under nine hours demonstrates social networking’s great potential for solving these types of problems.