However, after three turbulent years, McKenty’s website is starting to garner international attention. Created in 2005, Bountyup.com has received millions of donations to fund projects for Oak Bay science students, North Carolina choirs and Middle East social activists.

Trust me – if I had received “Millions of donations”, I wouldn’t still be freelancing for NASA. I believe the word I used was “dozens”. Ah well.

Oh, and I never got paid for being in the circus. My first paying job was shoveling horse manure, several years later.

Still, the coverage (plus the recent coverage of the Oak Bay High School Bounty) has been enough to get me excited about the project again – even after Microsoft launched their competitor. I’m toying with the idea of using 99designs.com for a face-lift, but what I really need is some improvements in usability. What are YOUR favorite contest sites?

 This last weekend, at the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver, I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes talking about collaboration and crowdsourcing with the great folks at GiveMeaning. I had a similar discussion with Jaison Morgan, of the X-Prize Foundation, in Santa Monica last fall. But sadly, these sorts of meetings seem to be few and far between.

By my last count, there are a few dozen web portals dedicated to crowd-sourcing, on the spectrum from ideation, through charity and into straight-up commerce and procurement. I should know – I run one of them. And yet, in a field defined by cooperation over competition, and the wisdom of the crowd over the supremacy of the individual, there is a noticeable glaring lack of communication between these companies.

To see what conclusions I draw from this, as well as the new cross-media tags I’m proposing, you can read the rest of the article here.

And, if you have ideas of things you’d like to see me blog about, (at OpenInnovators.net, on the BountyUp blog, or here) – please let me know.