Your Web, Your Way

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weed out the bad eggs • myspace.com With 120 million users, it's a whole new society, with features that maximize individuality • Google Maps Users can add their own points of interest to create mashups like www.beerhunter.ca • Google AdSense Provides free ads relevant to your website, then pays you if people click on them • Google The search empire built itself around a social function: counting links between websites THE GATHERERS The crowd isn't just expressing itself more; it's also gathering and filtering all those blog posts and photographs and finding an audience for them • iStockphoto This photo store taps an army of amateurs, who can sell their shots for as little as $1 • flickr The photo-scrapbook site helped popularize tagging as a way to organize information • Blogger The popular bloggingsoftware service makes every would-be pundit a publisher • Bloglines Lets users subscribe to various sites then receive updates from each one on a single page • Technorati Its search and ranking functions reveal the topics that are burning up the blogosphere • del.icio.us Allows users to share their Web-browser bookmarks, all organized by tags users provide • digg The crowd as news editor: readers "digg" stories they like and "bury" ones they don't Jeff Howe is a contributing editor at Wired. He writes about emerging trends at crowdsourcing.com and is currently working on a book about the crowdsourcing phenomenon