PROJECT IMAGIN8ION / Life in a Day

I regard the phenomenon of crowd-sourcing (e.g., wikis, online reviews, product-support forums, and other user-generated product) with a cynical eye; it smacks of exploitation, and thus I always feel a little guilty when I find the results useful or entertaining - which is almost daily. Here are a couple of examples that I'm in the midst of enjoying:

PROJECT IMAGIN8ION: Camera-maker Canon and film-director Ron Howard held a photo contest, ostensibly to provide ideas for a short film. I'm a little vague on the details, as the contest ended before I'd heard of it, but the submitted photos are amazing. Check out the above link if you have some free time.

On a similar note, have you seen the film Life in a Day? From IMDB:

What do you get when you ask the people of the world to chronicle a single day in their lives? You get 80,000 submissions, 4500 hours of footage, from 192 countries. Kevin Macdonald has taken this raw material, all shot on July 24, 2010, and created a 90-minute paean to what it means to be human in the world today.

I watched about half of it the other night, streamed from NETFLIX, before getting too tired to continue, but what I saw was impressive, with a Powaqqatsi / Koyaanisqatsi vibe.