Of the thousands of entries, Gavin Potter, a retired management consultant with no formal machine-learning training managed to rise to number 17 on the Netflix Prize Leaderboard. Potter writes, "The competition has trained several hundred, if not more, people how to properly implement machine learning algorithms on a real world, large scale dataset...This is, almost undoubtedly, the world's largest set of data on repeated decision making and it's ripe for analysis. The analysis may not win the competition, but it sure should provide some insights into the way that humans make decisions."

The public knowledge acquired from the process of producing these algorithms will not only affect Netflix's ability to suggest customer desires across its movie titles, but it will also form a baseline for other business systems. In addition to streaming entertainment providers, companies like Amazon and Pandora have worked hard to produce the best possible predictive technologies. If these company can tap into our unique tastes, they can suggest products and services we didn't even know we wanted. So a 10% improvement on recommendations can equate to a lucrative sales increase.

A second shorter term Netflix prize is expected in the near future. According to the New York Times' Steve Lohr, the Netflix Prize 2 will be concerned with "taste profiles" based on demographic and behavioral data.

While programs like Apps for America and Apps for Democracy work to crowd source programmer-driven applications, CitySourced can be utilized by a non-technical user. In addition to the decision-making data being generated from this service, cities also offer users an active outlet for their frustrations. Instead of sending out arbitrary rants and suggestions to their Twitter accounts, users still get a chance to complain while receiving a direct line to their municipal reps. If cities have the courage to make these complaints public, the site could become as entertaining as Craigslist's Best Of page while still maintaining its usefulness.

Second Place: Gov Pulse: This application allows users to browse the Federal Register and create feeds on the most important proposals and information. Users can browse the latest government-related notices, respond to regulatory amendments and comment on everything from endangered species to homeland security.

Third Place: This We Know: This application gives you government-related info based on your zip code. It offers information on the number of factories within a 7 mile radius, the number of pounds of pollutants released, violent crime rates, cancer rates and related bills in Congress. This would actually be a great tool for environmental health advocates looking to make the connection between cancer hot spots and chemical pollutants.

Best Data Visualization: Quakespotter: This site creates a 3d visualization of earthquakes and matches it to data taken from those areas on Twitter.

For a complete list of entries visit the Sunlight Labs contest page.

Best known for its "enthusiast" wikis, Wikia hosts more than 50,000 fan sites including the Star Wars Wookieepedia, Harry Potter Wiki, Twilight Saga Wiki and World of Warcraft WoWWiki. In addition to some of the larger fan sites, Penchina also points to the Cannon Hacker Development Wiki, Recipes Wiki and Pet Diabetes Wiki as great examples of Wikia contributors.

While Wikia hosts nearly 3 million pages of content with a number of niche community sites, it's the fan pages that drive the majority of advertising and marketing revenue. Wikia's small team of less than 10 sales staff create packages that consist of everything from branded banner ads to embedded shows and contests. In addition to sponsors like World of Warcraft, a number of television studios are also in partnership talks.

Says Penchina, "In many cases, these sites are like small franchises and the editors are really dedicated. The input we've had from editors regarding advertising are suggestions I generally agree with." In the World of Warcraft Wiki the community has asked that no advertisements be permitted that might negatively affect game play. For this reason, Penchina's team does not allow advertisements for WoW gold.

By providing an environment where die hard fans and premium brands can coexist, Wikia is doing a great job maintaining its authenticity while also turning a profit. While the service has struggled to establish itself as a separate brand from its Wikipedia origins, it appears that the fan communities have done everything they can to make it a success from the ground up.

2. The Beatles (111,896): In the Telegraph's list for 2008, two different Beatles pages are listed as numbers 14 and 18 for 2008; however, according to the original Wikistics source statistics the "Beatles" page is ranked at number 20. In 2009, the page became the second most visited page on Wikipedia due to automated requests. The fact that the Fab Four's catalogue is due to be re-released in digitally remastered format within the year also can't hurt page traffic.

3. Michael Jackson (79,734): Not surprisingly, Michael Jackson's page is among the most viewed pages on Wikipedia. The day after Jackson's death the page received 5.9 million views. Of the top 10 most-viewed Wikipedia pages of 2009, Jackson's name is also mentioned on the Deaths in 2009 page and briefly in the Beatles page due to his controversial purchase of most of the Lennon-McCartney Beatles catalog in 1985.

*Favicon.ico (78,077): While the Telegraph articles lists this as number 4, it's irrelevant as the Wikistics stat source cites that the Favicon.ico ranking includes browser-based requests for the Wikipedia icon.

4. YouTube (72,318): Whether looking to cite corporate info or simply interested in finding out what the fuss is all about, Wikipedians have flocked to both YouTube and Facebook pages for the last two years.

5. Wikipedia (52,542)

6. Barack Obama (49,401): In 2008 the Barack Obama page was the 3rd most visited page on Wikipedia and not surprisingly, interest has dwindled post-election. Sarah Palin's page (64,465) was the 4th most visited page in 2008 and John McCain's page (34,486) was the 13th most visited page.

7. Deaths in 2009 (48,758): Apparently the public is clamoring to remember those they've lost in 2009. Both the Deaths in 2008 page and the 2009 page have made the top 10 list of most visited Wikipedia pages. It looks like memorial sites like My Death Space and Respectance aren't such a strange idea after all.

8. United States (46,545): This page offers basic information on politics, economics, demographics and customs of the United States. With a large population and a large number of Wikipedians hailing from the US, the page is a popular one. Surprisingly it is not listed on the community's most vandalized pages. Meanwhile both the US Democratic Party and Republican Party pages are listed.

9. Facebook (42,679)

10. Wikipedia Current Events Portal (40,962): This page lists daily news topics and the latest Wikinews articles. It is a great source for breaking news stories. The page also links to recent deaths and ongoing events such as the automotive industry crisis.

For the Telegraph's entire list visit the article. You can also check them against Wikistics list of yearly page hits for 2008 and 2009.

Another interesting resource is Wikipedia's most popular articles within the last hour. While recently deceased celebrities appeared on this list at the time this article was written, there were definitely some interesting anomalies. For instance, the Ernie Davis Wikipedia page saw a dramatic increase in hits. When cross-referenced against real time search engine Collecta it appears HBO was airing the Ernie Davis biography "The Express". Audience members were simultaneously watching television while searching for Davis' biography.

Another Sunlight Foundation project is Get Represented. In a nutshell, Get Represented uses the GetSatisfaction model of public corporate discourse and applies it to Congress. Student Kyle Powers worked on this project for the Summer of Code in order to create a public feedback mechanism for government decision-making. Members of Congress have their own GetRepresented page and voters can comment, vote up articles and have public conversations with their representatives. While the final product is not yet available to the public, you can check for updates on the Sunlight Labs blog.

To view more Summer of Code projects visit the Google Open Source Programs page.

Kiva initially allowed users to lend to entrepreneurs in developing countries. However, due to the American financial crisis, the company recently extended its mandate to help US entrepreneurs gain access to micropayment loans. As millions struggle to execute on their dream projects, a number of crowd-based funding options have emerged. Below are a few of these tools.

2. Spot.Us: Spot.Us harnesses "community-powered reporting" by allowing the public to commission news stories. Filmmakers and reporters pitch the public on stories, and public donors commission their favorite story ideas. In this way, environmental organizations and under-funded advocacy groups pool their resources to collectively fund issues-based investigations. If a group wants exclusive rights to a story, they must fund at least 50% of that story's production costs.

3. SellABand: SellABand helps musicians crowdsource funding for their next albums. While Bandcamp, Amie Street and MixMatchMusic allow fans to donate after tracks have been laid down, SellABand specializes in the pre-recording phase. The service offsets the high costs of studio time and sound engineering. A number of SellABand artist albums are available on Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon US and Dutch-based Bol.com.

4. Contenture: Contenture is a micropayment service that allows content creators to monetize their sites. Users pay a monthly fee and their money is distributed to the sites they visit the most. Groups like Silicon Florist and Hashtags.org use Contenture simply by adding a line of code to their sites. In this way the most popular service members earn cash for their traffic. TipJoy also offered a micropayment tipping service to content producers; however, the company unfortunately announced plans to close a few days ago.

In addition to our 4 examples, we know there are a number of professionals who are crowdsourcing their funding efforts. From TwitPay to Tipit, let us know your favorite tools and what you're working on in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Lead image courtesy of Bradley Gordon

Three days ago the organization celebrated Wikipedia's 3 millionth English article and 2 days ago it launched its official iPhone app. In a week of landmark announcements, the company has managed to charm the Hewlett Foundation and kick start its strategic planning process.

"The Hewlett Foundation's support comes at a critical time," said Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner, "We've just begun the planning that will help us identify how to maximize our impact around the world. This support will help us to execute our priorities for the current year, and enable us to plan for the future."

In true crowd sourced Wikimedia fashion, the organization launched a public wiki for community strategic planning. To add your input in how the community is shaped in the next 5 years, visit the Call for Proposals page.

Says Maser to the community, "The success of this system depends on your participation and feedback, as it will help advertisers to create the best possible experience for the Digg community. Our goal with Digg Ads is to encourage advertisers to create content as compelling as organic Digg stories, and to give you more control over which ads you see on Digg.

It will be interesting to see which advertisers attempt to game the system by digging their own ads, and how fast these ads will be buried. The official June announcement of the Digg ad program received more than 400 comments within the community, and surprisingly many of them are very positive. While critics argue that the ads will simply be buried and advertisers will stop paying for placement, others called this "marketing democracy." A few commenters pointed to the fact that they already use Adblock - a Firefox extension that allows users to filter out advertising content. Nevertheless, others chastise Adblock users for not supporting the community they enjoy. In a community as opinionated as Digg's, it will be interesting to see how the first users react to this new play for revenue.

For now, the Wikipedia discussion page states,"Prior discussion has determined that Rorschach inkblots images shall be displayed in this article, and removal of pictures without consensus at Talk:Rorschach test/images [the discussion page] will be reverted."

Times reporter Noam Cohen writes about those against the posted images saying, "For them [the psychologists], the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year's SAT."

The fact that both of these tests are based on normative results adds another dimension to the Wikipedia debate - whether or not the inkblot test is a valid metric in the first place. In the late nineties, based on reviewing the demographics of students with the lowest averages in the country, critics called the SAT racist, urban-centric and classist. With the test determining college placement, scholarship eligibility and in some cases, job placement, it remains an important one. For this reason, it was redrafted in 2005 to be more tolerant of diversity and more reflective of classroom curriculum.

With the Rorschach inkblots having been established since the 1920's, what are the chances that each of us aren't already showing signs of major psychosis? If there's a doctor in the house, by all means, let us know if and how the psychological indicators of the test have changed over time.

There's no doubt that a number of those awaiting SATs and psychometric testing might choose to game the system. While higher SAT scores improve college eligibility, average Rorschach inkblot results might alleviate the fear of being estranged from friends and family. Unless the person being psychologically profiled wants to shirk criminal responsibility or can see themselves as a danger to themselves or others, it makes sense to want to establish "normality".

But why is Wikipedia more responsible to protect Rorschach testing than scientific journals or medical websites? Admittedly, I am not an expert in medicine, psychology or the forensic sciences and I have no idea how these Wikipedia images will affect the patient community. However, as a tech blogger, I understand this issue to be Wikipedia's dedication to free and educational content - even when that education is widely debated. It will be interesting to see if those against the inkblot posting will be able to determine a consensus to have them removed.

1. Project Lingua: This service aims to reduce language barriers on the web. With Project Lingua, volunteers translate alternative media sources from citizen journalists on the Global Voices network.

2. Worldwide Lexicon: This project first parses information with machine translators and real humans review the translations to ensure they are accurate. From here, the group republishes the sites in a number of languages in order to encourage cross-cultural dialogue. The group also built Der Mundo - what WWL describes as a "general purpose translation community for blog and RSS feeds."

3. WikiProject Echo: WikiProject Echo is a program where volunteer translators contribute their efforts to expanding the scope of Wikipedia. Volunteers will certainly have their hands full translating this amount of data as the site advertises 2.9 million English articles alone.

4. TED Open Translation Project: For polyglots, the TED Open Translation Project is a great way to practice superior language skills while contributing to a cause-worthy project. We're big fans of this educational series. All translators and reviewers are credited on the web page for a talk they've translated as with the above Arabic translation.

5. Cucumis: Cucumis also employs volunteer translators and all translation is thoroughly peer-reviewed. Once a translator's work is accepted, they receive points. The points are redeemable for translations from others within the community.

The innovative system is a pleasure to use and is being open sourced for other organizations interested in crowdsourcing similar tasks. You can honestly do something useful and important in 5 minutes or less on this site.

TransparencyCorps participants get points for every small task they do and can get themselves on a charming leader board of "transparency leaders." It's all very cute but this really is important work to be done.

We'd love to see an iPhone app to do this kind of work while waiting for the bus or in the line at the grocery store. How about a Facebook app that pushes out notifications to our friends' newsfeeds: "I just took 2 minutes and summarized a congressional earmark request to fund an environmental study of a proposed industrial park!"

Unlike Mechanical Turk, where there are scads of workers because they get paid small sums, TransparencyCorps volunteers are unpaid. Promotion will no doubt be the site's biggest challenge. If ease of use can be maximized and some effective promotion done, we think this could be a really great project.

This year's Knight News Challenge winners were just announced this afternoon, nine winning projects will receive over $2 million total to try and change the way the news world works. All of us should benefit from the results.

None more so than DocumentCloud. The winning project's description continues: "DocumentCloud will provide an online database of documents contributed by a consortium of news organizations, watchdog groups and bloggers, and shared with the public at large. Users will be able to search by topic, agency or location. Reporters will benefit from the wisdom of the crowd, which will be able to collaboratively examine large document sets."

Examination of large document sets and the systematic creation of shared cross-institutional memory with public access online? In concept at least, it doesn't get much hotter than that. It reminds us of Infochimps, a similar cloud for large sets of data, with programmatic access and user feedback on data quality. DocumentCloud isn't built yet, it appears, and InfoChimps is going to have a radical relaunch with more complete functionality soon. (We hope not to burst with excitement first.)

These kinds of juicy public banks of information are a big part of what the future of content and application functionality will be built with. Right now we're stumbling around online in the dark, with no illumination on all the data and documents around us except for cold-start full text or metadata search of what a handful of search engines can find spread out across disparate locations. Hopefully these upstart projects can pull it all off and all of us will be able to do much more informed research in the future. For updates on DocumentCloud, see the project's Twitter account.

The eight other winners of today's Knight Challenge include Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg's proposal to build a neutral site for the public to discuss reporting errors with journalists, Aaron Presnall's proposal to create an easy-to-use data-visualization tool set, Katrin Verclas's plan to build a mobile media toolkit to turn anyone in the world into an instant mobile reporter and artist John Ewing's virtual street corners - a project that puts full size audio and video displays for real-time conversation between people on two different street corners in different locations. Information about all the winners is here.

Disclosure: The New York Times syndicates ReadWriteWeb.

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.

Because god knows those algorithms have done nothing for search in the past. As for the "company insiders" part, we're drawing a blank on precisely what that means (Megan McCarthy, was this aimed at you?) and defer to the wisdom of the all-knowing RWW commenters to fill us in.

Stumpedia currently boasts around 28,000 URLs and 75,000 search terms in its digital lexicon - hardly enough to allow for a good or interesting browsing experience. By way of comparison, Wikia Search had indexed about 30 million websites before Jimmy Wales could say with a straight face that the product didn't suck. Just because we know he likes the attention, we ran a search on Robert Scoble:

As you can see, the single returned result was entirely irrelevant to the search term; Scoble's name was nowhere to be found on the linked-to page.

And sadly, for all the talk about insiders not gaming the system, the most relevant results in many searches we tried came from the Stumpedia founder/CEO. Here's a look at his profile and submissions:

We wanted to run a search for irony, but apparently the CEO hasn't submitted anything ironic lately.

Exhibit B: Gurutoy

Assuming that the 99 percent of Internet users who are not tech bloggers use search engines because they need to find accurate, relevant results, the bar of expectations rests rather high.

For example, if a user searches for "orange juice," he might not expect to see this:

As can be seen by mousing over the thumbnails, the two results returned for that search term were both uploaded by a Los Angeles haberdasher. The results were tagged with relevant ("plaid," "headware") as well as damn perplexing ("brad suzuki," Gurutoy's CEO) terms, and we're still not sure how this cap was returned as a result for "orange juice."

Distressingly, a recommended search for "action figures" returned dismally irrelevant results:

Two of the 13 featured results had information on action figures, and none of the images contained action figures.

The Problem with Reliance on UGC

Expecting that users will do the kind of data entry necessary to create a competitive product in this arena is ludicrous. The Internet already has a Wikipedia, so the kind of people with the knowledge and skill sets and the sheer time to invest have likely already picked their hobby and are eyeball-deep in barnstars.

However, Suzuki sees it differently: "The goal of Gurutoy is to become a visual directory of websites (any subject) on the net. But in a cool way, with the pictures." He compares the site to YouTube and has every faith in the power of user-submitted content.

"Gurutoy does not use any spiders to search the web for content. What we're counting on is for the masses to catch on with Gurutoy and to grow the content to make it relevant."

I asked SproutBox cofounder and venture tech/capital expert Mike Trotzke what he thought of algorithm-free social search engines.

"Oh, you mean a purely spam search engine with no users? Yeah, they suck.

"If you are going to try to introduce UGC into search engines, you've got to have some indexing first. It has to have some value out of the gate or no one will care. Not even Jimmy Wales could pull that off."

Trotzke continued to say that if any company would be able to incorporate valuable user-generated information into search, it would be Google. And he doesn't imagine that the search giant would be interested in buying a smaller company for their data or technology.

"[Google has] the vote-up technology already ready in waiting. They just need to tweak and start giving weight to all the data they have been collecting in SearchWiki notes for months already."

The Spam Question

Right now, most of the "users" interested in submitting content to these sites are retailers, enterprise sites, or others with a vested fiscal interest in driving traffic to their URLs. As you can see in this screenshot, MyJewelersPlace.com is spamming the heck out of Stumpedia:

Any site that permits user-submitted links is going to suffer the predictable, lamentable onslaught of black-hat, link-stuffed atrocities, especially for competitive verticals (I personally dare you to search any of these sites for iPods or Viagra.) Especially when adoption rates are low to begin with, UGC search engines are at high risk for being overrun by this kind of spam. This begins a circular process wherein potential users are scared or bored away from the site when search results are irrelevant, desperate pleas for clickthrus and credit card information.

For generic, noncommercial queries, few or no results will be returned. For more consumer-minded searches, results will be skewed and often uninformative. Allowing the community to police itself by flagging suspicious content is a necessary feature for any UCG site. However, when the amount of spam already outnumbers the amount of useful content on a relatively new search platform, what users are going to stick around long enough to register an account, let alone slog through the spam, planting flags left and right.

So, with more apologies to the startups named above, social search still needs to amass and index content using traditional search algorithms if results are to be useful to the end user. Then again, you could just let Google have this one and wait for your next big idea.

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.

WordPress interface and experience designer, Jane Wells, wrote about opening the testing process this morning and said that she's spent years responding to people who reference a nine year old article by usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen argued that usability tests only needed 5 participants in order to be effective:

"As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.

After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new."

Wells writes in response that, "While I've found that to be generally true, when your user base is as diverse in experience level, usage, platform configuration, language (right to left languages have a pretty different experience) and demography as the WordPress community is, 5 users really isn't enough to get a clear picture."

If you'd like to participate in this usability testing, professional usability test moderators are encouraged to contact Wells and eager guinea pigs are told to watch this space.