In its simplest form, crowdsourcing is simply generating ideas or work through the power of a crowd – usually enabled by the Internet. Wikipedia, for example, is one of the largest crowdsourced works in the English language, comprised of over 4.5 million articles submitted from all over the world.

The latest evolution of crowdsourcing is crowdfunding; collecting (often small) donations from a massive number of people. Charities, naturally, have benefitted from this type of funding scheme. However, quite a few for-profit projects have gotten off the ground this way too.

With over 250 million users, Pandora is by far the most popular Internet radio service in the world. However, it works differently than most other online music services, which can be confusing for new users.

Pandora is part of the “Music Genome Project” – a massive undertaking to classify thousands of tracks based on their musical attributes. Each song that Pandora plays has been analyzed by a musician (a process which takes at least 20 minutes per track), and classified using over 400 different “genes.”

Remember opting in to that psychology experiment Facebook performed in early 2012? Well you did, according to their terms of service.

In January 2012, Facebook manipulated the news feed posts of approximately 700,000 users to highlight either negative or positive emotions, to see if this would influence those users’ moods and status updates. After publishing the results last week, Facebook claimed that their terms of service (which all Facebook users must agree to) include the right to use any data they collect for research.