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Launched in 2009 by three friends who met as undergrads at Yale, Williamsburg, NY-based Rap Genius started as a site where fans could crowd-source explanations of rap lyrics by annotating online text. Over the past few years, it’s grown to include millions of music fans around the world. But it’s also started to attract communities interested in annotating non-music-related text, from The Great Gatsby to the State of the Union address to Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision.

In an annotated (of course) announcement about the Rap Genius funding, Marc Andreessen said the startup’s broader mission is to “Generalize out to many other categories of text … annotate the world … be the knowledge about the knowledge… create the Internet Talmud.”

Rap Genius is about more than rap

With the new cash, the founders say they plan to not only annotate the world, but to create a social network out of it.

“Facebook makes sense as a social network because it’s based on where people went to college. But I think it makes more sense to build a social network around text – be it religious or literary – that people unite around,” said co-founder Mahbod Moghadam.

In his post, Andreessen also mentioned another reason —  which he said might even be the “real reason” — why his company was so interested in Rap Genius: it has the potential to annotate text across the Web, not just documents on its site.

“A big part of it is we think this is a way of creating historical documents that are going to live forever,” said co-founder Ilan Zechory.  ”It’s a new layer of Internet culture.”

As the site grows, co-founder Tom Lehman said Rap Genius could release Javascript or browser plugins that would let publishers and readers annotate documents across the Web.  While it wouldn’t necessarily replace some of what comments currently do, he said, it could enable people to comment directly inline and allow a community to really co-create content.

Andreessen noted that when he and Eric Bina first built Mosaic, they initially built a “group annotation” feature directly into the browser but later dropped it because their implementation required a server to host all of the annotation.

“I often wonder how the Internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything — to add new layers of knowledge to all knowledge, on and on, ad infinitum,” he wrote. “And so, 20 years later, Rap Genius finally gives us the opportunity to find out.”

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The New York-based company said it’s launching its first product vertical specifically around Apple. Quirky also said it will team up with design-centric shopping site Fab to design and bring to market a new line of accessories for the recently-announced iPhone 5.

Since 2009, Quirky has enabled an online community to work with the company’s in-house engineers and designers to create two consumer products every week.  As part of its partnership with Fab, aspiring inventors can submit ideas for iPhone 5 accessories to Quirky starting today and then members of both Quirky and Fab will vote on their favorite ideas.

In 72 hours, the company said, the first products will be ready to go into production. Fab will start selling the new accessories on its site starting Sept. 19, two days before the iPhone 5 ships (more details here.)

In addition to the Fab partnership, Quirky founder Ben Kaufman said in a blog post that the company is launching a new Apple-focused vertical, including a commitment to launch a new Apple accessory a week and give Apple fans new collaboration tools.

From experience, I can say with great conviction that the world of Apple is home to some of the most aggressive, passionate, tenacious and super-knowledgeable community members around.

So, beginning today, we are committing to launch one brand new accessory product per week, with the help of Apple fans around the world. Beyond that, we will work to produce compelling content, and great tools that Apple folks can use to hang out and talk about their favorite products and dream accessories.

When Quirky announced its funding last week, Kaufman said they planned to boost community engagement with a new focus on verticals. This move – a smart one given just how rabid Apple fans tend to be – is the first step toward realizing that strategy.

Especially considering the amount of money Quirky has raised (and the high level support it’s receiving – Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker and Andreessen Horowitz’s Scott Weiss just joined its board) it’s nice to see the company launching interesting partnerships and initiatives.

Launching an Apple-focused vertical also takes Kaufman back to his roots a bit given that the 25-year-old first made a name for himself as an inventor and entrepreneur by creating Mophie, the popular brand of iPhone and iPod products.

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Food52 founders Amanda Hesser (left) and Merrill Stubbs

When Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs founded Food52 in 2009 they were looking for a way to create the world’s first crowdsourced cookbook. After 52 weeks (hence the name) of online recipe contests, they had the 140 dishes needed for their cookbook, but they also discovered they had inadvertently created a community of passionate home and professional cooks, all willing to share their recipes and their culinary wisdom.

Since then Food52 has become a premier destination for community-vetted recipes online, but its founders have grown even more ambitious. Hesser and Stubbs want to crowdsource how we actually cook.

In a recent interview with GigaOM, Hesser laid out how Food52 plans to become a central clearinghouse for cooking questions and food knowledge throughout the Web — sort of a Quora or Yahoo Answers for food. The idea is that anytime a cook has a question about a specific recipe, technique or general cooking topic, he or she would be able to ask that question from any cooking website – or from a mobile app or social media site – and get an answer within minutes.

Food52 has already laid out the groundwork with a service called Hotline, which Hesser describes as the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line for any food question. Cooks can ask their questions from Food52’s Website, via Twitter, through its iPhone app, or in its iPad cookbook, the Holiday Recipe and Survival Guide. Anyone can respond, as well as agree or disagree with someone else’s answer, but most of the responses come from Food52’s core membership of 50,000 highly active professional and home cooks (who account for roughly 10 percent of its 500,000 monthly unique visitors).

“Right now it’s a very solid proof of concept within our world, but you can imagine how powerful this could be if we integrated it with other sites,” Hesser said. “We want to distribute what we do around the Web. We’re building a widget that can be embedded in food blogs and sites that would expand our reach to a much wider audience.”

Whole Foods Market is already experimenting with the platform, incorporating the Hotline into a series of local food portals it’s launching across the country, rebranding the service as FoodPickle. Food52 isn’t working with any other companies or sites just yet. First, Hesser said, it needs to refine and scale its platform.

The recipe for the ultimate repository of cooking knowledge

Currently Food52 is only getting about 20–40 questions per day — though during the holidays volumes increase dramatically — a number that’s easily handled by its membership and moderated by the startup’s small staff of eight. In order to support what it eventually hopes will be thousands of questions per day, Food52 is developing an automated system for streamlining the Q&A and process, identifying which questions pertain to a particular field of cookery and pushing those queries to the relevant experts among its members. For instance, a question about a particular sourdough bread recipe would not only go into the overall question feed but would also be automatically pushed to the recipe’s author and Food52’s baking cognoscenti.

Ultimately, Hesser said, Food 52 wants to get every query answered in as close to real time as possible, because people most often have cooking questions while they’re actually cooking. A 20-minute response lag to the question “How do I know when my quiche is done?” doesn’t do you much good if your quiche is already burning.

“Over the Christmas holidays we saved a lot of meals,” Hesser said, but she added that Food52 can do better. “One challenge for us to get that critical mass of activity necessary to get questions answered in less than 5 minutes.”

Next, Food52 is trying to refine how questions are asked. While users can submit general hotline queries via its Web and app tools, Food52 is embedding code into its recipes pages that allows customers to ask questions about specific ingredients, techniques or steps described within those recipes. The engine then loads that relevant information into the posted question itself, making it easier for Food52’s members to provide specific answers. Hesser said Food52 will eventually expand those capabilities to its partners.

Food52 is also building a database of questions and highly rated answers, giving users instant access to a repository of stored knowledge about particular recipes or techniques. The more people use Hotline, the smarter it becomes, Hesser said. And finally, the startup is looking to take advantage of its higher-profile members to provide both authority and nuance to some of the more complex queries fielded by the site. Food52 has designated a group of 10 famous chefs, food writers and cookbook authors such as Michael Ruhlman and Dorie Greenspan as “MVPs.”

“There are a lot of fantastic food questions out there, but some of these questions require experience to answer,” said Hesser, who is no slouch herself (she authored the Essential New York Times Cookbook). “A lot of questions don’t have simple fact-based answers . . . The idea isn’t that what [the MVPs] have to say is necessarily more important than what others have to say, but we do want to add their knowledge to the conversation.”

Hesser didn’t reveal any details about the business model behind Food52’s expansion across the Web, though she did say the plan isn’t to provide a white-label service to other food brands. The New York City–based startup hopes to make Hotline its own pervading presence, drawing more people into the Food52 universe.

Food52 may also face some competition. In a recent conversation, Food Network’s SVP of online brand brands, Bob Madden, said FN is looking to make some big moves in its digital content strategy, including a possible cooking question-and-answer service of its own.

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Two films, Battle for Brooklyn and The Loving Story, were named to the short list for the feature documentary category for the Oscars, which are awarded in February. Another film, Incident in New Baghdad, has been short-listed for the Academy Award’s short documentary prize. Last year, another Kickstarter short documentary project, Sun Come Up, was nominated for an Academy Award but didn’t win.

For the Sundance Film Festival later this month, there are at least 14 Kickstarter projects that will be featured, up from 5 last year. The growing number of Kickstarter projects in Sundance comes after the fund-raising platform announced a collaboration last year with Sundance to help provide branding, educational and promotional support to Sundance Institute alumni.

I talked with Perry Chen, the co-founder of Kickstarter, about its success as a film fund-raiser. Film is the biggest category of projects for Kickstarter, which has more than 4,000 projects dedicated to documentaries, movies and videos. More than $45 million has been raised for film projects out of more than $125 million for all projects. Chen said he was excited about Kickstarter’s being able to help so many artists with a fundamental problem.

“When you look up and down at artists, from those starting out to career artists, fundraising is incredibly hard to get. Just because someone has a track record, it doesn’t mean fundraising is easy for them,” Chen said.

Battle for Brooklyn makers Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky

Suki Hawley, the co-director of Battle for Brooklyn, told me she turned to Kickstarter twice, first to help finish the film when her grant money fell short and then again to hire publicists after her film was short-listed for the Oscars.

“We couldn’t have finished the film without Kickstarter and it’s an example of bringing the community together and not relying on the 1 percent,” Hawley said. “Going to the community that is interested has been a revelation and a paradigm shift.”

Kickstarter has only been around since 2009, but it is showing that it has a lot of potential as a fund-raising tool. The fact that it is helping push really big projects over the top is just a sign that its model has appeal to all kinds of artists. Will we see a feature film Academy Award winner get Kickstarter funding in the near future? Perhaps not. But Chen said many of the Kickstarter films at Sundance are also feature films as well, so we may one day.

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Here are some ideas for tasks that can be crowdsourced, and links to sites that can help you with those tasks. Note that some of the sites mentioned can be used for several different types of crowdsourcing, and not just the tasks mentioned here.

Technical Tasks

• Translation. Need something translated, without having to rely on Google Translation to do the trick? Try MyGenGo.
• Transcription. Have audio files that need transcribing, such as a podcast? Try CastingWords.
• Photo tagging. Looking to get photographs tagged or classified and support a good cause? Try the nonprofit crowdsourced labor site Samasource.
• Keyword optimization. Looking for SEO help? Try Trada.
• Data verification. Have a long list of business information, like a contact list or URLs, and need that content verified? Try the CrowdFlower self-service site (CrowdFlower CEO Lukas Biewald will be speaking about the future of work and crowdsourcing at our Net:Work conference in San Francisco next month).
• Website testing. Looking for usability testing for your site? Try Usertesting.com.
• Beta testing software. Need some skilled beta testers to test your software or go through your code? Try TopCoder.
• Article writing. Need some content for your website or blog? Try SquadHelp.

Creative Tasks

• Logo design. Looking for a logo for your company? Try Prova.com.
• Business card design. Need a new business card layout? Try Guerra-Creativa.
• Print and online ads. Want a print ad or an online banner ad? Try 99designs.
• Website design. Need a new website interface design? Try crowdSPRING.
• Product development. Want to see if your cool product concept can become a real product? Try Quirky.com.
• Brand names and taglines. Looking for a new name for a company, product or service or a clever tagline? Try NamingForce.
• Video. Need a video produced? Try Tongal.
• Packaging. Need packaging for a new product? Try BootB.
• Creative campaign. Running a campaign and need a winning idea? Try IdeaBounty.
• Quick ideas. Need some fast, inexpensive input? Try IdeaOffer.

Whatever your need, crowdsourcing can help you get work done and tap into crowds of talented and skilled workers willing to perform work in new ways. Keep in mind that the work can vary in terms of quality. Most sites that charge for services have some kind of refund policy if you are not 100 percent satisfied, but read the fine print.

What tasks have you crowdsourced? How did you go about it?

stock xchng image by lusi

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