Everybody is saying crowdsourcing has failed but I beg to differ. There are so many successful collaborative, crowdsourced projects left. Whilst they may not style themselves as a crowdsourced project, it’s hard to argue that they are not!

The most successful crowdsourced project has to be Wikipedia. How many other encyclopedias can boast 2,000,000 articles made by over 7,000,000 users? In my opinion, 7,000,000 people can easily be classed as a crowd and 2,000,000 articles can easily be considered quite a lot of collective work!

The Open Directory Project is another crowdsourced project. It is one of the Word’s largest directories of websites and the moderators are all volunteers who work together. It is much more formal than Wikipedia and not quite as collabrative but once again shows how individual efforts combined can make something great.

Crowdsourcing hasn’t failed, just better business models need to be established on how to use it.

Amie Street is a site which recommends music to its users, then it allows you to buy those songs (or indeed, if the artist allows it, download them free of charge) and you can then recommend the song to others. If you recommend the song and the pr

ice increases as a result, you will get a share of that difference back. Prices change for the more people who download the song with a maximum of 98cents per song (still cheaper than iTunes!).

Some top names in Amie Street are Gary Numan, Badly Drawn Boy, Tay

Zonday (Chocolate Rain Guy), Wheatus and Vampire Weekend.

Amie Street is truly a social music shop and I love the way how pricing changes depending on the popularity of songs and how the users themselves can influence this by recommending songs, which involves the writing of a short review and having to compare the song to other artists (not each when you hear how unique some of these songs are!).

I also think the way it suggests music is pretty clever because it requires other users to tag songs as being similar to certain artists as you can use this to discover other tagged songs.

Best of all, the songs you download aren’t full of DRM and are nice, clean MP3s (the bitrate seems to be different for different songs).

You can put as little as $3 in your account in one top-up which will also get you 2 credits to recommend songs. You cannot recommend all songs or else you would, in order to maximise earnings. You can make $2.50 for referring a friend.

I would love to see how Amie Street, a fairly independent site, does compared to the likes of 7digital.

Needless to say, not all songs are available outside the US but I have not found one yet which has a US-only restriction on it.

If you join, please add me as your friend. My username is computerjoe.

Tags: music, amie street, itunes, mp3

So why do people keep turning to social networking? I imagine for the simple reason it is fun. I have resisted joining MySpace or Facebook so I do not get addicted to them preventing me from doing work, and so MySpace doesn’t deform my HTML, but I must say I get sucked into Twitter (but I try to only occasionally check it).

I am sure I will have plenty of commenters telling me how to productively use social networking for the purposes of actually networking and advertising and I have to say well done to them. I still think it’s impractical for the average person to regularly update a site like Twitter and only people who literally work on the Internet or (in the case of 10 Downing Street) are hired to update Twitter have the necessary time to use it productively.

I even doubt having the news texted to you by the BBC through Twitter is particularly productive because you are distracted each time there’s a new headline!

Naturally, you can follow me on Twitter here or on FriendFeed if you really wish (I don’t use it).

Grand Effect is a network specifically for technology bloggers and I am joining some long-time blogfriends such as Sarah (in Tampa) and Ghacks. I look forward to becoming blogfriends of other members of the network such as eXtra for Every Publisher, WinExtra and SheGeeks, ParisLemon, The Last Podcast and Mark Evans Tech.

Even though Grand Effect already has a fairly worldwide range of writers, because Mark Evans and David of XFEP are Canadian; Martin of gHacks is in Germany (Guten Tag!); and several others are in the US, I hope to provide another European voice!

As well as being a collection of fantastic tech bloggers, Grand Effect is a great advertising opportunity for start-ups and tech companies who wish to penetrate the tech blogosphere as they could easily find themselves on several tech blogs.

I have already received a very warm from network members, so thank you!

On a sidenote, 9rules is currently having an admissions round so apply if you fancy joining!

Former fellow 9ruler Mashable has covered Grand Effect twice. (link, link)

The site is very simple to use: you input your username and it provides other users whom you can follow. It immediately suggested several 9rulers whom I forgot to add on Twitter and I proceeded to follow them.

Who Should I Follow, I expect, works on the basis of mutual friends. Naturally, this means you get the likes of Scoble and Kevin Rose many times but WSIF cleverly allows you to filter results based on geographic location and popularity (so you can avoid having Twitter superstars showing up!).

I love this site. Not only is it Ajax-powered, but it provides a fantastic service which genuinely enhances your Twitter life!

Tags: twitter, ajax, web 2.0