Top Crowdsourcing Websites, Resources, and Companies

Your official guide to Getting Crowd Sourced and Crowd funded for Innovation:
What is buzz about crowd sourcing?:

“The phenomenon of corporations creating goods, services and experiences in close cooperation with experienced and creative consumers, tapping into their intellectual capital, and in exchange giving them a direct say in (and rewarding them for) what actually gets produced, manufactured, developed, designed, serviced, or processed.”

How can you or your organization get involved and how can social media help?

Crowd Sourcing Applications, Tools, and Resources |

What are the best crowdsourcing websites and tools? Here are some great ones I’ve run across:

• Kiva

• Gog Me

• Cool Town Studios and Beta Communities

• Kluster and Crowdspirit

• Crowd sourcing art and museum exhibits

• Crowd sourcing restaurants (props to the Affinity Labs, the coworking space in located in Adams Morgan in Washington DC and Harvey Rheingold)

A Range of Social Media Guides to Crowdsourcing:

• A great article at Read/Write Web on Crowdsourcing Case Studies and Examples

• Read about the Rise of Crowdsourcing in Wired Magazine Online.

This video presentation, including Jeff Howe, who coined the term crowd sourcing, including references to Threadless and Predictify. (warning: the video has some crowd created graffiti for lack of a better term) Jeff is followed by the CEO of Predictify. Predictify is an ingenious form of crowd sourcing and market data gathering (like fantasy football for predictions). You can even predict your own private prediction center that is customized for more targeted crowd sourcing (ie so called “partner pages” for Brittany Spears or Fidel Castro related questions). Predictify hopes to use the tool for engagement marketing, market research, business intelligence, and integrations with big media sites. For anyone who is a numbers geek or into psycho-graphic info, this platform is quite handy.

Of course, Yahoo Answers and Linked In Answers as well as Digg, Stumbleupon, and delicious are examples of web 2.0 platforms and companies which rely on the wisdom of the crowds. In addition, Google, Amazon, iStockphoto and Netflix embed various crowd sourcing mechanisms to deliver superior, targeted content.

Next, Future Memes has a great discussion of crowdsourcing lending.

Finally, the OJC has a feature on crowd sourcing for journalists, which seems to gloss over many of the important parts of crowd sourcing.

Whats your favorite crowd sourcing website? What would be a cool application for crowd sourcing?

Wisdom of the Crowds and Crowd Sourcing Books, Companies, Websites and all Around Bibliography:

• The best crowd sourcing resource I’ve found at BNET
• Crowdsourcing Directory
• Spot.Us for citizen journalism and crowd sourcing news
• Crowd Spring (Crowd sourcing creative, logo, and web design) CEO Interview by Frank Gruber
• Wisdom of the Crowds by James Surowieki
• How to Plan and Design a Crowd sourcing Website
• Crowd sourcing video production with Media mobz (thanks to JD Lasica and Zadi Diaz at Epic Fu)
• Employee recommendations and internal communication (idea management) via Employee Suggestion Box (thanks to Jeremiah Owyang)
• See also Google Map Maker
• Great analysis of prediction markets + wisdom of crowds. Cool stuff.