Still looking for ways to recapture their 90's era popularity, American Online (AOL) has launched Owl. Owl is a site focused on user-generated content using AOL's content management system called "Seed."

The site will be a repository where freelance "experts" can provide knowledge, opinions, and images. Crowdsourcing the articles should allow AOL to increase the content on the site quickly and cheaply.

Contributors to the site will be paid 50% of the profits from advertising if the content is exclusive and 20% if not. Techcrunch did note that the site is more of a design concept and that most of the articles seemed to have been written by the staff.

Read the story here.

According to this Cnn article, this week over 100 different charities are battling for votes on Facebook to win $1 million dollars. This new outreach campaign started by JP Morgan Chase is giving donations amounting to a total of $5 million dollars to 100 different charities chosen by Facebook users. This new approach is very different from the old grant process that charities would have to go through to get financial contributions.Now Chase has decided to put the power in the hands of the American people's Facebook users.This new approach was started when Chase decided to take a database of 500,000 non for profit organizations and upload the information on to Facebook.Chase then allowed "crowdsourcing" to decide which charities were deserving of recognition and then in turn be entered into the Chase Community Giving Competition. Once an organization was entered into the Chase Community Giving Competition, a tournament like process started via Facebook, where users could decide who deserved a financial contribution from Chase.

To learn more log on to Facebook and support one of your favorite charities by becoming a fan of "Chase Community Giving".

This article made me think of our previous assignment. In Europe, users can edit maps such as adding public bathroom locations, new one-way streets or even just recommend beautiful sightseeing spots. The project was coined the "Wikipedia of Map." Users aren't allow to use the service for commercial uses, but for the past couple years the project has appeared to be successful.

The NHL is using Twitter lists to create lists of fans through crowdsourcing. NHL fans are rapidly requesting to be put on lists and fans are networking with each other more than ever before. This has also exposed some issues with Twitter lists that may not have been thought about before:

What kind of stuff would you suggest if you were asked to help design a car? What if it was a race car? In this case the car in question is the Rally Fighter by Local Motors. The company browsed a number of internet sources for help, asking the public what they thought. The result? An off-road race car that will get 36 mpg on the street and 30 mpg while racing.

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/10/30/vroom-for-everyone-local-motors-unveiling-crowdsourced-rally-fi/