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Have you ever tried asking a question on Facebook and wondered if anyone ever saw it? The problem with asking all of your friends on Facebook a question through a status update is that you never know who is going to see it. Between Facebook's algorithms, the mass of updates and the simple fact that not everyone lurks on Facebook 24 hours a day, you never know who your question will reach.

Enter Cloudy, an iPhone app that "lets you quickly and easily ask groups of friends for their opinions."

If you're a TV actor, you have the Emmy Awards. If you're a journalist, you have the Pulitzer Prize. But if you're a citizen reporter, what do you have? Nothing, until now.

CNN announced today that it was launching the CNN iReport Awards "to honor the best examples of participatory journalism in 2010."

The National Library of Finland has launched a new program to support the digitization efforts of its archives. The project, Digitalkoot (Digital Volunteers), blends microtasks, crowdsourcing, and video games to break up and distribute some of the dull repetitive work of verifying digitized records.

"We have millions and millions of pages of historically and culturally valuable magazines, newspapers and journals online. The challenge is that the optical character recognition often contains errors and omissions, which hamper for example searches," says Kai Ekholm, Director of the National Library of Finland. "Manual correction is needed to weed out these mistakes so that the texts become machine readable, enabling scholars and archivists to search the material for the information they need."

In a world where crowdsourcing has become a mainstay of politics, a new site from the Democratic National Committee is taking the idea one step further and asking voters to find damaging videos of opposing lawmakers and candidates.

The Accountability Project is pretty simple: you can upload and view videos, or track down Republican candidate events. There's no voting or comments; it's essentially a platform for videos to go viral. So far, uploads mostly consist of tepid footage of conservatives criticizing Democrats. But when compared to other political crowdsourcing projects, the site stands out as one of the more potentially disruptive ideas in this midterm election.

Perhaps you have some spare time on your hands, or perhaps you just want to do good for others from the comfort of your desk chair. Either way, a great way to fulfill these needs is to participate in crowdsourcing - community driven conglomerations of small efforts by large crowds of participants. The simplest form of crowdsourcing are online wikis like the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia, and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other great examples. Here are a few great ways to get involved in the wonder of crowdsourcing.

Companies have been trying different ways to use crowdsourcing even before the word was first used in 2006. Last year saw the rise of it as a marketing tool, with some spectacular failures. Two memorable examples were Kraft, which was ridiculed when it changed the name of one of its products, and Toyota, which was criticized for a disturbingly off-color video.

Crowdcast has raised $6 million from Menlo Ventures in a deal that bodes well for a new generation of companies with crowdsourcing and business intelligence offerings.

Crowdcast is also receiving a follow on investment form Alsop-Louie Partners. The funding will support expanded sales and marketing efforts. It will also serve to expand Crowdsource integrations with third parties.

Crowdcast applies risk management principles and crowdsourcing techniques to gain insights from employees. Questions are posed to employs who provide answers along with bets about what they feel is the probable outcome. The betting is intended to force respondents to look at an issue, apply logic to the issue, judge the different factors and make a decision.

During my time in Boulder last week, one of the more interesting startups I was introduced to was Trada, a virtual marketplace for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Using Trada, advertisers and agencies looking to take advantage of search engine ad networks can crowdsource the development of keyword-based ads to the service's growing number of paid search optimizers. Previously, ads through Trada were only available on Google and Yahoo, but this morning, the startup has announced support for Bing and Microsoft adCenter.

Customer relationship management software company Salesforce has bought Jigsaw, according to an announcement from the company. The San Mateo, CA-based Jigsaw is a crowd-sourced business contact data outfit.

Salesforce delivers its information via cloud computing, as does Jigsaw, so their models match up.

Today, one year-old Demotix, the London-based citizen journalism site, has introduced video to its popular photo-centric site.

Demotix, the winner of a Media Guardian Innovation Award, has placed its crowd-sourced photos on the front pages of traditional media organizations from Le Monde to the New York Times to BBC News Online. Although there have always been articles as well, it is the photostream that has proven to be Demotix's bread and butter. Video, like photos, may prove capable of speaking across more borders than words.