Today's announcement incorporates community contributions from a bunch of new countries, territories, and even an entire continents into the live Google map. The graduates are: Afghanistan, Antarctica, Ecuador, Georgia, Guatemala, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Honduras, Iraq, Norfolk Island, Saint Pierre & Miquelon and Saudi Arabia.

Google has strained under the weight of mapping the entire wold. After launching Map Maker to crowdsource the effort in 2008, it has steadily increased the importance of community contributions. In April, Google opened Map Maker in the U.S., a tacit admission that it can't map all the locations and businesses itself, even in the world's most wired places.

In September, the Google LatLong team even shifted some of the Map Maker approval process onto Regional Expert Reviewers from the community, rather than having staff moderate all changes.

The system has shown signs of strain. It took the Google Maps team two months to recognize South Sudan's independence, despite a clamoring community. But Google has pressed forward with its effort to expand the global importance of Maps. In August, 40 new countries received localized top-level domains for Google Maps.

As curating Maps becomes a worldwide effort, crowd contributions from Map Maker will only become more important. Today's large crop of graduates is a recognition of great work by a community of volunteers around the world.

Congratulations to the graduates!

For more before-after photos and videos, check out the Google LatLong Blog.

"We're asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight. Interested users can fill out a simple form to describe the nature of the e-mail, and provide a name and e-mail address so we'll know who should get the credit. Join us here on Friday afternoon and into the weekend to participate."

The release, which begins at 9:00 a.m. Alaska time (one hour earlier than Pacific Time) tomorrow, will consist of "e-mails Ms. Palin sent as governor, mostly using private accounts" and "are to be released in response to public records requests first made in 2008," according to the Times. The release is only being made in hard copy, which will fill "six standard paper boxes, a total of about 250 pounds at a printing cost of $725 per set."

Palin is currently on a bus trip across the country which reads as a thinly-disguised public relations event and temperature-taking for a possible run at the presidency. Even if she decides against running, her influence with the right-wing Tea Party movement makes her newsworthy. So what she my have thought and how she may have acted while in office as Alaska's governor will be of interest to many.

Other news organizations are also preparing processes to leverage the participation of their audience, including MSNBC, Mother Jones and ProPublica, who are working with Crivella West to create a publicly searchable database.

Palin photo by asecondhandconjecture

The crowdsourced computing initiative which those behind the Australia bid have put together will leverage personal computer power in lieu of extremely expensive petaflop supercomputers.

Computerworld Australia describes the crowdsourcing project.

"The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), along with iVEC, the company running the $80 million high performance computing Pawsey Centre at CSIRO in Western Australia, are set to launch a 'citizen science' application this year based on the open source Nereus V Cloud computing technology developed at Oxford University. The application, dubbed "theskynet" by Australian researchers, would grant anyone not affiliated with the global telescope project access to the datasets formed out of the array's work."

By 2013, when it is fully up and running, the application should allow the Pawsey Centre to engage in petaflop computing. It will also make it the third-fastest supercomputer in the world, as well as possbily the largest cloud computing networks on the globe.

According to PopSci, the SKA will consist of 3,000 radio dishes, "spread as far as 2,000 miles in every direction from a central core, offering a full 1,000,000 square meters (that's one square kilometer) of collection surface."

There have been crowdsourcing projects already to help crunch the massive data that comes through various astronomical projects, most famously, the Seti@Home project, which began in 1999. Seti@Home is a radio telescope project to listen for signals that might come from intelligent life. It continues to this day.

Distributing computing and storage needs between institutional and personal computers is not a one-way street. In addition to saving money, saving heat and energy (using already-running computers), it will also provide datasets from the array to both scientists and members of the public willing to run the app on their rigs.

Australian radio telescope photo by Amanda Stater

Given the extensive mapping services available here in the U.S., why would Google open up this tool here? Google is crowdsourcing corrections and additions, the company says, by allowing its users to add more detail about the places they know best. But there may be more to it than that.

With the Map Maker, Google says you can fix the name of local businesses or add improved descriptions. You can also add more information about an area, like bike lanes or the names of buildings on college campuses, for example. To prevent any high jinx from occurring, Google notes that it will review the user-created submissions before they go live.

While on the surface, the launch of Map Maker in the U.S. appears to just be another useful feature to differentiate Google's mapping service from its competitors, there may be some additional motives behind this launch.

One motive may have to do with the expansion of Google Places, the search company's Yelp-like business locator service. In April, Google merged its socially-infused local business recommendation service called Hotpot into Google Places, the larger business database which provides reviews and venue information. Now Google is crowdsourcing edits to that same database via this U.S. launch of Google Map Maker.

Building a Better Location Database, Thanks to You

One of the primary assets of companies involved in providing location-based services is their database of venues. On this front, Facebook is a tough Google competitor, with its own database of locations called Facebook Places. In September 2010, a company spokesperson said the goal for Facebook Places was to be the "central platform for location data" across the Web. And in February 2011, Facebook made some under-the-hood changes to the way it houses venues listed on its site, a move that enables the network to have an accurate, universally standardized database of locations.

Location-based check-in service Foursquare also has its own venue database, and, like Google will now as well, uses crowdsourcing to help keep that database accurate. In theory, select superusers on Foursquare's service are enlisted to clean up duplicate venues and make sure each pushpin is accurately placed. The job of crowdsourcing this cleanup is not going well in my local area - nearly every major venue has at least 2 or 3 clones, if not more. In fact, last I checked, my gym was listed four or five times!  (I'd love to hear more about your experience with this problem, or if you don't have one.) This may or may not be an across-the-board complaint, but it does highlight the challenges of creating a location database where users themselves are permitted to enter venues of their own, with no direct company oversight.

It should also be noted that another Google competitor, Microsoft's Bing, has also gone the crowdsourcing route to some extent, partnering with Open Street Map (OSM) back in August 2010, to make it available as an additional layer on top of Bing Maps. The company has donated aerial imagery to the Open Street Maps community too, and, in November, hired OSM founder Steve Coast to come work at Bing Maps.

To put it simply, today's announcement from Google has a deeper impact to the company's overall strategic initiatives than simply a case of "oh look, new tools!" Clean, accurate, robust, detailed and up-to-date maps and databases of locations will be key to growing any business that leverages location data in the future, which today includes a number of mobile services, and their online counterparts.

So Y Combinator alum Chirply is taking on the greeting card industry by crowdsourcing stationery designs. Chirply had its soft launch a few weeks ago, soliciting designs and voting, and the startup is now ready to open its doors to the retail business.

Chirply's greeting card cost $4 (with shipping included in the U.S.) and users can buy any 10 designs in a mix-and-match pack for $25. The cards are all 100% recucled, 100% post-consumer waste. In addition to greeting cards, Chirply also offers the designs printed on notebooks and on wrapping paper.

This is great news for consumers (because, come on, we are socially obligated to buy greeting cards and we spend an inordinate amount of time sighing at the selection). But more importantly, Chirply is great news for designers.

Co-founders Gagan and Neel Palrecha care a lot about the design community, and they want to insure not only that the Chirply has beautiful designs for consumers to vote on and purchase, but that designers can participate in a site that showcases their work and compensates them fairly. Chirply doesn't ask designers to submit their original files, for example, just composites (until their submissions are voted on to be printed, of course). And Chirply pays artists a flat fee ($300) up front when their designs are selected, in addition to paying royalties based on sales.

Since Chirply's soft launch, this approach does seem to be working, as the startup has attracted some high quality submissions. That has piqued visitors interest, who on average cast about 30 votes, often over multiple sessions. The top cards on the sites have received well over 500 votes, in just under 5 weeks.

In addition to opening its retail store today, Chirply is announcing a round of funding, from a lost list of investors including Keith Rabois, Dave McClure, Mitch Kapor, Charles River Ventures, and others.

An added bonus: ReadWriteWeb readers can get 30% off their orders if they use the code "RWW" during checkout.

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 collaborative relationship that we have with our iReporters is one of the unique strengths of CNN, and in many ways represents the future of storytelling," said Meredith Artley, managing editor and vice president of CNN.com, in a press release. "These awards are designed to celebrate those outstanding efforts."

According to the release, awards will be broken up into six categories: Breaking News, Original Reporting, Compelling Imagery (photos or video), Commentary, Personal Story, and Interview. In each category, five users have been nominated and will be judged by a panel of "innovators and trailblazers in participatory storytelling."

Nominees run the gamut, from iReporter Johnny Colt, who "took a boat out to the coast of Grand Island in Louisiana to expose BP for its slow effort in cleaning up the oil spill", to Sam Bolton, who "investigated the lack of progress made to clean up unexploded bomblets from the Vietnam War." While all of these iReporters may have varying levels of training and experience, they have something in common - the desire to relate their experiences and stories to the world, and CNN offers that platform. Of course, anyone could simply upload videos or relate these accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Blogger or any other "Web 2.0" medium, but CNN might lend a bit of credibility. When CNN independently confirms details on a report, it stamps it with a "vetted" badge.

Awards will close on March 7, but until then you can see all 30 nominees on the iReport Awards site.

In order to help make Twitter more accessible to this growing global user-base, the company has just announced the Twitter Translation Center, an effort to crowdsource translations so that Twitter can quickly launch in additional languages.

New languages added to the Translation Center, in addition to those already offered, include Indonesian, Russian and Turkish. Those are the languages into which Twitter will be translated next, and the company says there are more to come.

Crowdsourced Translations

Crowdsourcing translations isn't new. Facebook is now available in over 70 languages, for example, thanks in part to the efforts of over 300,000 users who helped translate the site. And Twitter says it's been using volunteer translators since October 2009.

Crowdsourcing translation works by taking a word or phrase - such as "hashtag" or "Privacy Policy" - and asking for input and feedback on translations. The community then agrees on the best possible translation. You can sign up to help translate Twitter - its mobile and websites, its apps, its help and business centers.

LearnBoost's decision to crowdsource the translation echoes the process that Facebook started two years ago, something that proved incredibly successful in helping the social network spread internationally. Facebook is now available in over 70 languages, thanks to the 300,000 or so users that helped translate the site. LearnBoost is hoping that taking a similar approach will give them a cost-effective way to boost their international audience as well.

But with a far smaller engineering team and a far smaller user-base, LearnBoost has developed a technological solution that's "better than Facebook's," boasts CEO and co-founder Rafael Corrales. This is in no small part because translators will never have to see or understand the HTML tags that often appear in other crowdsourced translation efforts.

LearnBoost has created an active translation interface, showing teachers which phrases need to be translated, as well as where it is located in the application in order to provide some context. Submitted phrases are compared and vetted by an internal tool for accuracy, and the community can vote on the most popular phrases.

Once a language has been translated, users will be able to view LearnBoost's gradebook in their native language. And because of the way in which LearnBoost has built the tool, as new features and pages roll out, LearnBoost's system will automatically include them in the crowdsourcing translation process. In other words, the translation feature will scale as LearnBoost grows.

Open Sourcing Translation, Internationalizing Node.JS

And while a translation project to spread LearnBoost to non-English-speaking educators is cool, as with many of LearnBoost's undertakings, what's under the hood is just as exciting. LearnBoost has built an internationalization layer on top of the Jade node.js template language that, in the words of co-founder and CTO Guillermo Rauch, "makes it easy for developers to define what needs to be translated. Traditionally, developers have to be bothered to add translation hooks that are too obtrusive and have to deal with HTML, which in turns is difficult for translators." In addition, with the help of a tool called jade-serial, every time a new feature (and by extension a new phrase) is added, the internationalization systems checks to see if requires a translation.

For very young and small company, LearnBoost has open sourced a number of impressive open source projects, and the startup already has over 2500 followers on GitHub. And this new translation tool, jade-i18n, is available alongside LearnBoost's other projects, including Socket.IO and Mongoose.

Well, it's true - kind of. Amazon is indeed getting into the movie-making business with the launch of a new portal called Amazon Studios, but it's not a traditional studio by any means.

Crowdsourced Movie Production

The Amazon Studios portal provides tools that allow anyone to upload their content, be it a script or a full-length movie called a "test movie." These "test movies" have to be more than 70 minutes, but don't have to be "full budget," explains the company.

Once online, other Amazon members can read the scripts, watch the movies and even edit the content, by uploading their own alternate or revised versions. Members can also provide general feedback on the items uploaded to the site.

Amazon Studios will also award cash prizes in regular contests to those with the best scripts or movies. The first contest, underway now, is offering $100,000 for the best movie and two $20,000 awards for the best script. (Details here). In 2011, Amazon will dole out $1.1 million in awards, with $1,000,000 for the best movie and $100,000 for the best script. (Details here).

Winners are selected by a judging committee, an unknown group of "experts" and company execs, who will determine which items are worthy of Warner Bros.' attention.

Warner Bros., as the only Hollywood studio partnered with Amazon, has a "first look" deal with the new site, meaning Amazon Studio winners will be considered for future theatrical feature films. In addition to the cash rewards, winners actually get to meet with Warner Bros. development executives.

Said Roy Price, director of digital product development for Amazon, the company hopes that the new site will help filmmakers experiment and collaborate with each other. Filmmakers can make movies with the scripts posted online, for example, while screenwriters can upload scripts to get their movies made.

Internet Community & Movie-Making: Sometimes You Get "Snakes on a Plane"

The goal of the project is to "democratize" the process of breaking into Hollywood - and for that, we (and anyone who's seen some of the drivel that keeps getting produced there) are grateful. That being said, the Internet community doesn't always have the best judgement when it comes to what makes a great movie. Let's not forget the "Snakes on a Plane" debacle of 2006. Probably one of the first cases of crowdsourcing movie production to fans, filmmakers even reshot parts of the movie in response to fan feedback: they added more snakes, more gore, more death scenes and even the now infamous line, " I want these mother..... snakes off the mother.... plane!"

Of course, the movie bombed. It made just $1 million more than its production budget alone. What works online doesn't always translate to the big screen, you see.

Granted, in that case, there wasn't a "test movie" involved, like the kind Amazon is proposing - fans at the time were reacting to what they knew of the film's plot. Seeing a low-budget version of the film online may have changed things - it's hard to say. After all, the Internet community has an odd sense of humor at times.

As for whether the new Studios project is an oddball offering for Amazon, a site primarily thought of as a shopping portal, it's not, really. For one thing, the end product Amazon is funding will end up as inventory on its virtual shelves. Amazon also has a history of "democratizing" access through Internet technology. Its cloud computing infrastructure delivers the power of large server farms to even the smallest business or individual and its lesser-known, but fairly popular, on-demand, scalable workforce at Mechanical Turk crowdsources large jobs by splitting them up into smaller tasks performed by anyone with an Internet connection and a bit of time to kill online.

Amazon Studios fits in nicely with those types of democratizing, crowdsourced ventures. Whether or not it will lead to the next major blockbuster, however, is yet to be seen.

"We're growing very quickly and we're very happy with the uptake," Trada founder and CEO Neil Robertson told ReadWriteWeb. "Google Ventures looked at our businesses and the assessment was that our growth was interesting to them."

New Cash, New Goals

The $5.75 million C round brings Trada's total fundraising to just under $8 million. Robertson says the company has been extremely tight budgeted thus far, spending just $2 million over the last two years. The sudden influx of cash will give the company breathing room to expand and try some new things, he says.

First, the company plans to help provide improved and tailored services to both its large agency customers and its smaller business customers. Secondly, it will expand internationally to run campaigns in more countries. Currently, Trada accepts international customers and experts in the U.K., Australia and Canada, but has yet to brand out to non-English speaking countries.

Lastly, as part of the company's long-term goals, Trada is looking to extend its crowdsourced PPC ad model to other forms of online advertisements. Robertson says the company started with PPC ads because of the obvious crowdsourcing benefits to keyword campaigns. Now the company realizes that other ad styles - including display, banner, mobile and video ads - can also work on this model. The company also expects to allow for campaigns on newer ad platforms, like Facebook and Twitter in the near future.

The Google Bump

Google piece of the funding comes from Google Ventures, the company's investment arm. Rich Miner, one of the original co-founders of Android, has been on boards with Robertson in the past and now manages the Google Ventures fund. Miner joins Robertson and Foundry Group's Seth Levine as members of Trada's board.

While the connection between Google and Trada is an easy one to make, Robertson says that not preferential treatment is given to any of the search giant's investments. As Robertson added, Google likes to make sure that "all boats rise with the tide" when it comes to its investments. The relationship will also not affect or limit the services which Trada offers to its customers, said Robertson.

The fresh cash certainly puts a smile on the faces at Trada, but out of everything, Robertson is most excited for the crowdsourcing community at large.

"We're really happy to have another significant venture firm taking a position in the crowdsourcing ecosystem," said Robertson, who heads an information group of similar companies known as the Crowdsortium. "It's a good sign to see larger tech companies in the evolution of this industry."

Photo by Flickr user horiavalan.

But "Web Applications" is just the first of many new StackOverflow-like sites on the horizon, and surprisingly, the next sites to launch may not be tech-focused at all. ]]> Stack Exchange Uses Crowd-Sourcing to Launch New Sites

StackOverflow, the original site that led to the Stack Exchange network's creation was founded by Joel Spolsky, author and CEO of bug-tracking software company Fog Creek Software, and respected developer Jeff Atwood back in 2008. The idea was to create an alternative to the market leader at the time, Experts-Exchange (EE). Where EE was a fee-based site, the vision for StackOverflow was to offer a simpler, entirely free site where you could get the same type of assistance from knowledgeable users. To encourage participation, site users vote up the best answers to questions and those whose answers are voted on receive boosts in their "reputation" scores.

Earlier this year, the company raised $6 million from Union Square Ventures and announced plans to launch a handful of targeted sites running the same software. Spolsky said that the future sites would be determined by an automated process where community members propose a site, establish the site's ground rules and gather a team of core experts who commit to the site. When a critical mass has been built up (the boiling point determined by algorithms alone), the site opens. You can see this process in action now in StackExchange's new staging area, dubbed "Area51." Here, you can track the proposed sites, how many people have committed to them, details about the site's plans and goals, and, once launched, stats on number of users, questions, answers, views and more.

Web Applications, the Q&A site for "expert and advanced users of Web applications" was the first site to go through this automated launch process and a site for "Gaming" is now hot on its heels.

While the newest addition to the network is certainly a handy resource (we already learned how to print a Google Wave and organize Gmail labels), it's the site staging area that's the most impressive part of this whole venture. Instead of the company having to think up ideas, gather interest, entice experts to sign up and encourage people to join, the entire process has been offloaded to the community itself to handle. It's crowd-sourcing at its best.

Beyond Tech: StackOverflow's for Cooking, Guitar and Grammar?

The site staging area will allow Stack Exchange to extend beyond its tech roots, assuming the future proposals in Area51 prove popular enough to reach the launch stage. Sites for food and cooking, English language and its usage, home improvement, photography, board games, coffee, guitars and other less-technical hobbies are listed among the geekier topics like SEO, game development, GIS, user interface design, healthcare IT and more.

The question now is how will these niche Stack Exchange sites compete with the one-stop shops, like the recently launched Question and Answer service Quora, which provides a single destination to ask questions about anything? Or the more personal Q&A offering from Formspring, which lets individuals share answers with a community on conversational topics. Plus, we can't ignore the fact that Facebook, too, is planning a Q&A app called "Questions." Can anything complete when Facebook - and its nearly half a billion users - get involved? And will Stack Exchange's niche answers fare as well as Yahoo Answers when it comes to being highly ranked by Google's algorithms?

Stack Exchange's move from a tech-related resource to a network of sites with broader appeal is a smart move, given the interest in the question-and-answer space at this time. But it also opens it up to bigger competition as well. It was one thing to take down Experts Exchange, but can it do the same with Facebook and Yahoo?

The bits and pieces submitted from around the world will then be collected and built into a feature-length documentary film that will debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Anyone whose footage makes it into the film will be credited as a co-director and could also be one of 20 people selected to attend the premier.

This project has enormous potential to create something truly amazing, in my opinion. YouTube is by far the largest resource for sharing and viewing video on the Web, and big name directors Scott and Macdonald should have no problem creating a compelling story from the plethora of submissions they are likely to receive.

Other projects in the past have leveraged the YouTube community to create collaborative media projects. Composer Eric Whitacre assembled a virtual "YouTube Choir" by taking submissions from users singing the various voices of a few of his choral pieces. The success of YouTube's "Life in a Day" project could be big win for crowdsourcing and the real-time Web, placing it front-and-center in the spotlight and encouraging its further evolution as a platform for multimedia collaboration.

The project managers choose a reward price for their copmany's project, the minimum being $200, and users submit their entries for consideration. The managers can then interact with the users, offering suggestions for revisions, and eventually hand pick a winner to receive the reward in return for the already completed work.

Large corporations have even joined in the action, offering large rewards for projects like designing a new pasta shape for Barilla, or creating a new iteration of TiVo's logo. But reactions to crowdSPRING's methods have not been all smiles.

Many take offense to the fact that users are asked to submit fully completed creative works to the site without any guarantee of compensation - a practice some refer to as "spec work." We investigated this issue back in January, and brought it up again in March after the site launched the addition of writing services and some were concerned about intellectual property.

Businesses that are concerned with the issues some raise about crowdSPRING show be aware of the alternatives available for sourcing creative services on the web. TechStars' Andrew Hyde, who is outspokenly against spec work and crowdSPRING, launched his own platform, Pick.im, which provides designers and developers (among others) with a place to host their portfolios and find work. Other sites, like Forrst, provide an exclusive community for designers and developers to interact and share work and get feedback.

Regardless of these other networks and the anti spec work sentiments, crowdSPRING has continued to grow as one million entries attest to the site's success.

With information-taming technologies like search engines already at a reader's fingertips, there is debatable value in the Doc Viewer's ability to annotate a story with "raw" information. However, the fact that the Doc Viewer's code is due to be released on an open-source basis introduces an additional value to it. It is not just the back-end that a media source, of whatever size, will have access to, but the whole megillah.

This latest viewer by the New York Times is the latest iteration of a two year development process. The viewer allows reporters to augment stories by including evidentiary documentation and providing context to news stories. The viewer keys documents to words or phrases in the source story, allowing viewers to pursue the process to the depth they prefer. These "annotations" are similar to an old-fashioned "hot link" but with a new-fangled dynamic delivery.

Future versions will open up the annotation process to readers, instead of just the writers and editors. Additional features may include an embeddable version for blogs, a search-friendly version without JavaScript, variable image file type control and the ability to create custom annotation shapes. The open-source software behind Version 2.0 will be released "in the very, very near future," according to the newspaper, and will be available on the Times' Github page.

The key criticism to this undertaking, of course, is: so what?

BayNewswer quoted Aron Pilhofer, the paper's editor for interactive newsroom technologies, as "recognizing that news organizations are slowly but gradually becoming more and more like technology companies." They are, that is, more likely to triumph if they leverage a wider distribution of invested community members.

Alan McLean, interface engineer at the Times, says his focus is on the Doc Viewer as a reporting tool.

"Fundamentally what we are trying to do here is get as many tools in the belts of reporters as we can to assist them in telling stories online," he told RWW. "Seeing it as a publishing platform is somewhat limited. It really depends on the kind of content that is being published."

However, Chris Heisel, in a post on an earlier version of this viewer, said, "In a world where I can easily find more infor­ma­tion than I can ever pos­si­bly use does the public really need more access to raw infor­ma­tion."

We read news in a politically and socially polarized environment. The most common charge against the NY Times - this most mainstream of MSM - is bias, that there is nothing more than a writer's unexamined feelings or political secret sauce to support the angle of a given story. With foundational documents appended to the story itself, the reasonableness of the reporter's approach should prove easier to determine.

But that is posited on the not-altogether-likely notion that reason and reality will overpower the desire to froth.

The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

AOL recently announced a similar 0-to-60 sort of initiative with its attempt to cover every single band at this year's South By Southwest festival with its content distribution project Seed.

Patch is a "hyperlocal" website that offers news, photos and videos, discussions and information about local businesses. It is run by "professional editors, writers, photographers and videographers who live in or near the communities [they] serve". As such, Patch seems like a perfect candidate for the type of service offered by another arm of AOL, crowdsourced content provider Seed.

While the article declares the intention to go from 30 sites to hundreds "quite the ambitious goal," we wonder if having a system like Seed already in place wouldn't make an otherwise potentially daunting task a bit easier. Actually, the SXSW coverage seems like a good testing ground for doing the same sort of coverage in hundreds of locations throughout the country.

As Paid Content wrote last month, Saul Hansell left the New York Times' Bits Blog in December to join Seed, with the purpose of "leveraging Seed across all of AOL's platforms".

Looking at the site, it would seem that the only issue in growing from 30 to hundreds would be general scalability, as each location is identical, but with different content. With an army of content providers at your fingertips, it would seem that the expansion is the obvious next step more than anything else.