Crowdsourcing Projects You May Not Have Heard About

We all know about Threadless, Kiva, Current TV, iStockPhoto and other staples of the crowdsourcing world. But what's so fascinating about the concept is just how easy it is to employ by any Internet startup.

Every day I come across new innovative uses of crowdsourcing. Here are a few on my radar this morning.

Know of any other crowdsourcing startups? Leave them in the comments.

• Studio Wikitecture: "Improving Architecture and City Planning by Harnessing the Ideas behind mass collaboration, social networking, wikis, folksonomies.....etc etc etc."
• StrayForm: "A community where                           artists and fans can thrive with no DRM, no commericals                           and no corporate middle-men." Reminds me a bit of Deviant Art with a more 2008 look and feel.
• Knewsroom: This startup has been pronounced dead in just under 38 days. Funny - I gave it at least 50 days. Man, I wish I had written a blog post about how bad an idea this was so I could say "told ya so" right now. Of course - I can't talk about Knewsroom without discussing its parent company Kluster. I have sharp opinions about this New York startup. Too much for a link post - so I'll move on for now, but perhaps will revisit later.
• Crowdsourcing the Genome. "To speed up that process, a group of scientists has harnessed the Internet through Wikipedia."
• The BigCarrot - I'm fascinated by sites like this, ThePoint and Community Goals. It's hard to pin them down as "crowdsourcing." But - notice I'm using ThePoint right now to crowdfund for journalism. These sites represent a new age in collective action.
• YouBundle - an early startup that looks to be an evolution of Digg and Squiddo, but it's too early to call.

Comments

[geoff]

Signed up as a beta-tester for OneEyeDeer a liitle while ago. It's a user-generated innovation site (my definition, not theirs)

They just sent me an email saying testing is open again.

It's still pretty early on, their email said they're still trying to get the "basic functionality" right

Not sure if it's pure crowdsourcing - no company is making an open call etc., it's more bottom up stuff, but still looks like it may have potential.

the address is www.oneeyedeer.com

[Peter Organisciak]

Same here with Knewsroom. The announcement of it's founding has been at the very bottom of my usually clean inbox for nearly two months. I had been putting off the act of trying it out, partially discouraged by NowPublic's failures, and I guess my indifference has won out over its existence.

[Digidave]

My big problem with Knewsroom

1. It was WAY confusing of a site. I know first hand (Assignment Zero) how a simple site architecture is priority #1 if asking users for support.

2. I just don't like Kluster: http://kluster.com/
The video in the lower left hand corner explains it all. I can't even link to the video cause the site is built in F'n Flash... I mean REALLY... a FLASH website! That alone is reason to hate a site.

[Peter Organisciak]

Point #1 is such an important note that can so easily be overlooked. I had no involvement in AZ, but last week (quite coincidentally) an editor that had been stressed to me that exact point: as grand as the concept was, something seemingly arcane like the interface made it so much less effective.

In the Kluster family, I think that NameThis has the most potential in concept, because it's something that can so very much benefit from the crowds. I've never met a person that can name things with ease, be it a blog title, a product name, or a story heading. However, the implementation of NameThis is a bit...lacking. I don't like to criticize simply as an observer (and without offering something better), but the system of payment is odd, and despite Kluster's best attempts, the submissions are too competitive in nature to achieve ideal results. As I said, though, it is at its basis a good idea, and their projects have had strong results.

[Walter]

We're not really a startup but an Austrian research institute. We launched a crowdsourcing application called "Sentiment Quiz" for Facebook yesterday: http://tinyurl.com/sentiment-quiz

[kraloyun]

Point #1 is such an important note that can so easily be overlooked. I had no involvement in AZ, but last week (quite coincidentally) an editor that had been stressed to me that exact point: as grand as the concept was, something seemingly arcane like the interface made it so much less effective.

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I had been putting off the act of trying it out, partially discouraged by NowPublic's failures, and I guess my indifference has won out over its existence.