It seems like new crowdsourcing platforms pop up daily nowadays, so it's not surprising that many of them fall to the wayside when compared to previously-established systems.

Unless you've avoided newspapers like the plague over the last year or so, you know that some people in the United States aren't exactly happy with their healthcare. Insurance companies bog down the system, potentially fruitful developments get underfunded and lost in red tape, and the average citizen has very little say in terms of changing the care he or she receives, meaning that the concerns of niche communities can fall to the wayside.

Are you a hawkeyed defender of intellectual property? Do you hate getting swindled by yet another terrible knockoff of an otherwise fine product? Does the sight of shysters videotaping movies in the theater give you the heebie-jeebies? BrandBounty wants you!

When we describe crowdsourcing to another person, the most likely three categories we mention are microtasking/microlabor, like Mechanical Turk, Crowdfunding on sites like GoFundMe, and Open Innovation on sites like Innocentive...then we make some passing comment about collective knowledge and Wikipedia. However, we all know that there's more behind crowdsourcing than just these few models that have created a market for themselves.

In the last of my quick app reviews covering sites that push the traditional workplace out of the realm we consider universally accepted, and introduce it to the wild world of microtasking, I'll be looking at crowdsourced landing page optimization. If you're looking for an optimization platform geared towards small businesses, then look at what Pluralis has to offer. Their model is straightforward: is your company landing page not getting the conversion numbers you need? Put up a contest on Pluralis and their crowd of optimizers, web designers, and SEO gurus will get to work redesigning your site. Whoever redesigns the best landing page is the designer that gets paid. Simple stuff, right?

Policymakers in the US and UK amongst others have said they want to strengthen the use of evidence in policy making, through a greater reliance on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to establish the impact of programs and interventions. But before they introduce new rules and requirements to do this, they should consider another largely neglected source of evidence - the views of users of services themselves, which crowdsourcing could help to gather for them.

In continuing my string of shorter reviews, here's another beta site that's helping push the traditional workplace out of the realm we consider universally accepted, and introduce it to the wild world of microtasking and creative collaboration - Soylent. Soylent bills itself as a "crowd-powered interface: one that embeds workers from Mechanical Turk into Microsoft Word." It's apparently what happens when you have a crowd inside your word processor.

To maintain a healthy brain and lifestyle, sometimes it’s necessary to get out of your comfort zone and shake up the accepted formula. I'm not about to go running down the street in a dress and top hat for the sake of novelty, unfortunately, but I can eschew the standard format just once to provide a series of shorter reviews, instead of one big one. And conveniently enough, my next three platform reviews push the traditional workplace out of the realm we consider universally accepted, and introduce it to the wild world of microtasking and creative collaboration.

We all know that you can pay to get something translated if you want, but what about all the content on the web that nobody is willing to pay for? In a crowdsourcing era, there is no reason the web shouldn't be translated, even if it has to be done for free. Enter Duolingo, the platform that allows foreign-language learners to translate web pages one sentence at a time while they learn a new tongue.

If you’re an up-and-coming writer like myself, you know how difficult it can be to simply find someone who will pay for your talents. Not everyone is the next Great American Novelist; some people just want to receive an assignment, crank out a few hundred words, and receive their direct deposit.