crowdsource

Super Bowl Sunday offers no respite from partisan bickering in this presidential election year.

A Silicon Valley startup found a strong overlap between how people feel about who will win today's big game and who they'd like to see win the presidential election in the fall.

Mountain View-based Saygent conducted a survey asking 205 people for their Super Bowl predictions and then did a bit of data crunching using its voice response and analysis platform. Saygent's algorithm looked at the way people talked about the teams and the game ("by analyzing the way people talk about the game we can infer who is actually knowledgeable and who is taking a stab in the dark," the company says).

Saygent then filtered out "people with very low trust or a strong bias" to come up with a prediction from its "trusted crowd" of 90. The result? the New England Patriots by three points.

That's almost identical to the official line, which had the Pats by 2.5 points at last check, and is--frankly--not that interesting.

But Saygent, in what it admits is not an exact science, also asked people in the same survey who they planned to vote for for president. When it took a look at those political preferences, it revealed quite a rift:… Read more

I suppose, if you were of charitable mind, you could think of it as an in-depth analysis of the currently unemployed.

But isn't there something in itself entertaining about the relentless, breathless, technologically boundless pursuit for nuggets of joy from the collected digital works of Sarah Palin?

Should you have unaccountably lost several of your faculties and had to advertise for their recovery on Craigslist, you might not have noticed that Alaska has released 24,199 pages of e-mails sent by and to the state's former governor.

These seem to signify that she spent 38 digital pages a … Read more

When Ronald McDonald House in Cincinnati needed a nine-page English document translated to Arabic, the children's advocacy organization turned to Sparked. Someone living in Jordan logged on and translated the prose in a few hours. Then someone from California confirmed the accuracy of the piece. Crowdsourcing skills and bite-size volunteering is what Sparked is all about.

Sparked connects corporate employees with nonprofits via the Internet, giving employees a way to volunteer right from their cubicles. Sparked co-founder Jacob Colker calls this micro-volunteering, a term he's trying to coin.

When I visited the small, barren Sparked office in San Francisco's hip SOMA neighborhood, Colker showed me the company's volunteering platform, which it licenses to major corporations. Employees from companies including new client LinkedIn or Google, Frog Design, Kraft, and SAP can sign in and volunteer during their lunch breaks--and people can focus on certain regions or specific issues. But the volunteer work is not limited to corporate partnerships. Individuals can also sign up at their leisure to help nonprofits with all things digital, from branding issues to blogging advice.

Originally, Colker thought people would volunteer their time while sitting on the bus or lounging by the pool. As it turns out, people out and about are probably not going to be able to help a nonprofit with a branding issue, Colker said. Instead, he maintains, people would much rather help others from their office, right at their desktop, during the free time they have between work-related tasks. The company started as The Extraordinaries in 2008 and within the past eight months rebranded itself to switch its mobile focus more to the Web. … Read more

You may not know the name Inrix, but the provider of flow data and prediction supplies the traffic data for dozens of automakers, aftermarket GPS providers, and municipalities. It's very likely that you already use Inrix's data in some way without even knowing it. Inrix's app for iOS devices and Android brings that same traffic data to your smartphone along with a few features new to its latest version 3.0 update.

Comparative Traffic is an at-a-glance look at the major differences between the current traffic conditions and normal traffic trends. Roads that are moving more slowly … Read more

Attention all GarageBand fans. We need your help creating what we think may be the world's first crowdsourced, fully multitouch-generated album. That's why we're putting out this call for submissions. Please send us your best original musical compositions, so long as they were created wholly using multitouch-based applications like GarageBand (it's OK to add your own vocals, if you dare).

We'll pick the best 10 compositions and songs for inclusion in our digital compilation, which we'll promote around our cubicles, and perhaps even on some sort of globally interconnected network of informational portals, or "sites." All musical genres are welcome.

Here's how to enter:

1. Get creative with GarageBand (or another multitouch music app). 2. Document the process of creating your composition in a video (so we can make sure you only used multitouch apps and didn't bring in a big band), and then let your musical work play in full at the end of the video. Videos should be no longer than roughly seven minutes in total. 3. Upload the video file to MediaFire for free and send the link to emackCNET@gmail.com. Be sure to include your name, location (city and state), and e-mail address. 4. Get them all in by April 30, 2011. Multiple entries are just fine.

We look forward to hearing your creations. Get tapping! And no "Stairway to Heaven" remixes please. We don't want any copyright lawyers after us. … Read more

The TomTom navigation app for iPhone gets an update to version 1.6 this week and gains a crowdsourced map correction tool that's been available on TomTom's line of standalone GPS devices for some time now.

Map Share, as the service is called, is a free, user-generated maps correction engine that lets you make small edits to your locally stored maps with the touch of a few buttons from within the TomTom app. Possible changes include edits to street names or posted speed limits, changing the direction of traffic on, for example, a one-way street, modifying turn restrictions … Read more

When retailer The Gap introduced a new logo last week on its Web site, updating its blue box logo of more than 20 years, the Twitterati unleashed its inner Heidi Klum.

Online critics said the new logo looked "cheap" and "unsophisticated" and as if it was designed in Microsoft Word or someone was experimenting with Photoshop for the first time.

Well, Gap takes design criticism better than many a "Project Runway" contestant: After touting the updated version last week as "contemporary" and "current," the company is now saying "auf … Read more

When crowdsourcing goes well, an army of contributors collectively can create impressively large-scale works such as Wikipedia's online reference site and iStockphoto's vast library of images that can be licensed relatively cheaply.

But there's a flip side, as iStockphoto is seeing this week: when you enrage your community of contributors, the wrath is on a correspondingly large scale.

On Tuesday, the Getty Images subsidiary announced a new payment structure for those contributors whose photos, videos, and other content it sells. But many fear the new plan--based on the contributor's performance during the previous year rather than the total images sold--will mean a significant cut in their payouts in 2011. iStockphoto stands by its forecast that the change will benefit most contributors, but in the meantime, those contributors lashed out in thousands of overwhelmingly negative forum posts in two days.

The clash offers a glimpse into growing pains that can come with a new generation of Internet businesses. The Web made iStockphoto possible, providing a global network to harness legions of amateur photographers and to reach countless customers. But when it's time for change, that structure and scale adds challenges that conventional companies don't usually face.

Reworking an ordinary company requires buy-in from employees and customers. For a companies such as iStockphoto, Digg, or eHow, though, the large group of people who supply the content also must be persuaded to make the change.

Pay cut? iStockphoto photographer Cat London, aka Stray Cat, is one of many who fears the worst from iStockphoto's new compensation plan, expecting to see her royalty rate to drop in 2011 rather than increase from her arduous work to rise through iStock's ranks.

"My math ain't good, but I know that 30 percent is lower than 40 percent, and I know when I've been cheated out of something I worked my ass off for years to get," said London in a forum post. … Read more

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible, but not necessarily to create it outright. This makes Wikipedia a natural partner.

It's therefore no surprise to hear when the search colossus helps out the cooperatively written project.

Specifically, Google is helping Wikipedia with translation, so subject matter documented in one language needn't be created from scratch in another. Google described some of its translation work in a presentation at the Wikimania conference in Poland over the weekend.

"In the last 16 months, Google has been working with the Wikimedia Foundation, … Read more