What's the Next Step for Crowdsourcing? Read our latest blog for The Huffington Post

Trawling through entries to The Good Web Guide's third Website of the Year Award recently, it was gratifying to see an overall improvement in the quality of website entering our award and intriguing to note an increased number of sites entered that are using crowdsourcing as their model.

Defined by Wikipedia - the crowdsourced encyclopaedia - as "sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to an undefined large group of people or community (crowd) through an open call," crowdsourcing uses the web to invite small contributions from multiple people and, in doing so, fund projects, build content, create ideas, solve problems or perform tasks that traditionally would have been completed by one person or organisation, or, in some cases, may not have been achieved at all.

Driven by the rise in and uptake of Web 2.0, crowdsourcing embraces social media as a way of directing communication and encouraging collaboration that can be advantageous when applied to many different scenarios. This has been particularly true for the consumer, who - via sites such as Groupon and Crowdity - can now enjoy much larger discounts on events, products and services than they could before by simply spreading the word amongst their friends and using the power of the group or crowd to drive down prices.

In Australia, an interesting development of this idea is currently being applied to energy companies via a new crowdsourcing business, One Big Switch, which uses "the power of group switching" to help consumers get the best possible deals on their energy bills. As British energy companies continue to hike prices, despite increases in their profit margins and many people facing fuel poverty this winter, this is something that is clearly needed in the UK.

To read the full blog, visit The Huffington Post. And do feel free to share the article on your social media pages, or use the comments section to give your own views on the subject.