ReadWriteWeb

Yesterday morning, social news and bookmarking site Reddit announced to its users that they were being drafted. For what, you might ask? The ongoing battle of sites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon against that ever-present foe, the spam submission.

Using crowdsourcing to combat spam submissions on an already trained populous that already votes on everything seems like a smart way to outsource an otherwise difficult task.

A new startup is looking to apply crowdsourcing to the fashion industry. Fashion Stake, whose website will open to the general public in several weeks, will allow the fashion-conscious to directly invest in designers.

Its motto is, "Democratize Fashion" - a tall order.

The site, led by Harvard Business School alumnus Daniel Gulati, will put designers and companies together with consumers on two levels, financially and critically. Financially, an investment in a designer will return the ability to apply credits toward purchasing that designer's garments.

Wikipedia, the online user-created encyclopedia and the number six website on the Internet today, is about to get a makeover. And it's a big one. According to a blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team detailing the changes, the upcoming Wikipedia redesign, due to launch April 5, aims to make the site easier to navigate, easier to search and, perhaps most importantly, easier to edit.

In the world of risk management, it's all about probability. But often, it takes considerable time to get an answer to important questions. But as of late, risk management is seeing a transformation, in most part fueled by the advent of real-time communication.

The most recent example comes from Crowdcast, which has entered into a partnership with SAP's risk management group.

Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment.

But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?

All across the country, newspapers are shuttering and those that remain are closing down bureaus and pulling correspondents left and right. More and more, media outlets are relying on fewer sources for their information because of a lack of funding, but a number of websites have appeared to solve this problem.

One such crowd-funded website, Spot.Us, has released a series of new features today in its efforts to save us all from the closed-minded future we're currently facing.

Digg and Revision3 co-founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson have provided crowdsourcing startup 3Crowd Technologies and its founder Barrett Lyon with an early Christmas present of funding.

Lyon says the angel investors join Storm Ventures and Greenwich Technology Associates to "give 3Crowd the shot in the arm it needs to take off," likely sometime early next year.

If early stage companies are supposed to change the world, then Crowdflower and Samasource are model organizations. This morning the two are launching the Give Work iPhone application, a tool that empowers users to increase training and jobs for Kenyan refugees. Rather than playing games or winning badges from location-based services, iPhone users can spend their free time helping others. The joint iPhone application asks users to verify remote work deliverables in order to speed payment to those in need.

I had hoped that by 25, I would have been living in LA, dating actresses, and getting bit parts in bad movies as "the ugly guy"... you know, in the event that the studio wanted a Steve Buscemi-type, but not the Steve Buscemi.

Instead, I'm 26, broke, and trapped in Glens Falls, New York. I vent my frustrations by writing comedy pieces for the Huffington Post, I run a blog about social publishing, and, for some odd reason, I'm more popular than Serena Williams, Newt Gingrich, and Stephen Colbert ... on Twitter. Sadly, this doesn't help my chances with Serena or make me any money.

I'd like to change that this year.

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