ReadWriteWeb

With advance apologies to the hard-working PR folks and startup companies who have pitched us their social search engines this week, there is a rising menace in new media: A cluster of sites that call themselves user-powered search engines.

Much in the vein of the failed Wikia Search (the abandoned brain child of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales), these engines purport to "crowdsource" intelligence about URLs and search terms by allowing users to create profiles and submit, submit, submit content. Stumpedia and Gurutoy are two products in this category. Each offers the excitement of multimedia, semantic, "neue search" capabilities; and each delivers astonishingly dysfunctional results.

If there's one thing that social software can never get enough of, it's usability testing. Good old WordPress has the advantage of a global community of super loyal fans to tap for testing, and this morning that's just what the company announced it is going to do. WordPress usability testing is being opened up to the community of users.

It's worth noting that WordPress isn't just any chunk of software: it played a formative role in the early days by giving millions of people a voice online. It's still one of the best examples of an open source ecosystem which has been made infinitely more rich for users by involvement of outside developers than the company could have created by itself. And it's a system used by some of the biggest publishing firms in the world at a time when the publishing industry is undergoing one of its biggest periods of change ever. CNN, Time, the New York Times and millions upon millions of bloggers are all using WordPress. Helping test the next version of this software is a pretty big deal.

One part people, one part machine. Is that a formula for more effective decision making? A number of high-profile entrepreneurs believe it is, and they are starting companies based on the idea.

In the following post we take a look at three of the most exciting startups entering this emerging market. The movement is a logical development now that millions of people are comfortable posting information online. The web's next step is to leverage machine learning. These are three companies to watch who are doing just that - combining user input with technology that improves its performance by gathering and processing data. In this case they are doing it in order to help people make better decisions, but these are just some of the first consumer technologies that will enter the cyborg-like space that combines people and machines in order to better serve people.

People have been whispering about a new web application in development called Hunch. Today, Flickr co-founder and Hunch head honcho Caterina Fake divulged some more details about the new project on her blog.

The new project aims to become a site that can help anyone make a decision about anything. The way it will do this is through the application of decision trees that are created by contributing users. Using decision trees in expert systems is nothing new, but applying that idea to a crowdsourcing model might possibly be a stroke of genius. Think Aardvark meets Wikipedia and you start to get the idea.

Best-selling crime author James Patterson will release a new kind of novel next month - one that's been collaboratively written with the crowd. Called AirBorne, the upcoming novel will feature 30 chapters, each written by a different author except the first and last - those will be written by Patterson himself. With the release of this book, it appears the Web 2.0 movement of collaborative writing is about to hit the mainstream.

Next Tuesday, the eyes of the United States - and likely the world - will be on Washington, DC, as Barack Obama takes the oath of office to become the 44th President of the United States. Attendance is likely to dwarf any presidential inauguration in history - with estimates currently predicting at least one million people at the event. Regardless of the attendance, one thing is for sure: with nearly ubiquitous access to cameras and video equipment, this will be the most well-documented inauguration, ever. Now, the Microsoft Photosynth team has announced that they will be making the event even more memorable - by creating a three-dimensional "synth" of the inauguration from your photos.

With tools like Dopplr, FireEagle, and BrightKite, many of us make it a regular habit to inform our contacts as to where we are and where we'll be. But sometimes, our paths of travel don't provide the most important insight: Why do we go there? TripSay hopes to change that by giving people a way to share information about the places they go - and why they recommend their friends go there, as well.

Any number of companies - like computer giant Dell for example - have taken to "crowdsourcing" their R&D, asking customers what features they'd like to see and then letting the public vote the best ideas to the top. Now, it seems that Google is taking the opportunity to include its massive user base in the decision process with the release of Google Product Ideas, a new offering that allows users to - you guessed it - propose what they'd like to see Google build and vote on proposed ideas from others.

Just in time for the first day of the Democratic Convention in the U.S., Kevin Rose today announced a new feature on Digg: Digg Dialogg. The idea here is to allow the Digg community to submit questions that will then later be posed during interviews with "thought leaders and tastemakers." The first person to be interviewed this way is going to be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The interview will be streamed live online on Wednesday the 27th.

Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, is a model of labor that has been fully embraced on the Internet over the past couple of years. Crowdsourcing takes tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce. The large-scale committee approach is powerful because it leans on the concept of the "wisdom of crowds" (to a certain extent) which says basically that the more input, the better the output. We've written about a number of companies that employ crowdsourcing to produce their product or service here on ReadWriteWeb, but in this post we'll specifically look at companies that allow you to leverage the crowd to get something done.