#1 Crowdsourcing

The idea of outsourcing work to the internet is hardly new – Amazon has effectively crowdsourced all of it’s product reviews for years, but there are a few interesting projects that have popped up recently.

Hunch is a project by on of the people who developed flickr and is effectively a technology demonstrator – it’s a social network with questionnaires which learns from the answers given by the community and & builds up idea of who you are and then helps you identify what things you would be interested in. Although the commercial potential is obvious, this approach could work for matching campaigners (or donors) with charities they’re likely to be interested in. SocialActions.com

During the expenses scandal the Guardian newspaper uploaded nearly 500,000 documents and crowdsourced the analysis of them on their MP expenses website.

Crowd sourcing translation for emergency info was used in Haiti by Ushahidi although it posed problems with matching the expectations of users on the ground with what was practically possible by the aid agencies.

Taking the concept even further The extraordinaries is a mobile phone app which describes itself as micro-volunteering – and which seeks to answer the question “I have 20 minutes right now what can I do?” by matchmaking suitable volunteers with tasks.

Google Animal Translate

Introducing Translate for Animals (beta): Bridging the gap between animals and humans

Google have now updated their real time translation software with an android app (sorry iPhone fans!) that provides animal translations. So now you can answer the question as to what Mr Dog/Caesar is actually talking about.

get the app here from google

DIY Carbon Freezing Kit

Yes I know you love me dear, but why can’t I move my arms and why am I now someone’s favourite wall decoration?

Now you can cryogenically freeze yourself for 5-30 years. Yes, really! Making a complete Han Solo of yourself has never been easier. Or possible.

Make a Han Solo out of yourself

full details available here (via firebox.com)

Textp

Help save youtube bandwidth by selecting textp rather than video. For every person who selects TEXTp and keeps it on while they watch a video, they save YouTube $1 a second, resulting in potentially billions of dollars of savings (not to mention the environmental benefit of saving server load).

TEXTp is the result of months of intense transcoding efforts by our engineers, who toiled for weeks to ensure that a large chunk of videos on the platform could be reduced to their most basic elements. By replacing the images in the video with a series of letters and numbers, the videos are far less taxing on our system — and have the added benefit of promoting literacy!

see the above in all it’s textp glory on the Youtube website

Not sure if it’s working out cities using IP addresses, geotagging or the user’s self declared location (in which instance we’d all be tweeting from Tehran).

Now including Brixton

http://charity.further.co.uk/

By tweeting:

Tweeting this message gets 10p donated to The Children’s Society charity http://bit.ly/4PcaKP #furthercharity

your profile picture then appears on the page and the Christmas tree totalizer counts up the donations. There’s the option to top up your donation as well – although I’d be interested to find out how many tweeps actually do this. It’s always good to see twitter being used for things other than talking about Tiger Woods.

Give a tweet this Christmas

I’ve now moved my blog to wordpress rather than drupal as a bit of an experiment!

I’ve moved my two most popular posts over from the old site, but hopefully will be blogging a bit more frequently.