This new feature, which goes by the name of YouTube Slam, is a head-to-head match race between two videos at a time, and you get to vote for your favorite of the two. Each week, there will be new videos to watch and choose from, and the votes will be tallied on the YouTube Slam leaderboard.

The videos are not random, you can choose from five different Slam channels: comedy, cute, music, bizarre and dance. Just pick a category and start playing the game!

But it gets even more interesting. Not only can you test your viral-video predictive abilities, if you’re good at it, you also get points. You can then enjoy the game even further by comparing your score with friends and seeing who the best predictor of viral videos is. You can also subscribe to Slam channels to keep track of all the top videos in each one.

What do you think of YouTube Slam? Is it your favorite new game, or a waste of time?

Source: YouTube Blog

This is where a service like BestVendor trots in to offer personalized recommendations and helping you discover the best work apps and the right tech solutions for your business.

I could just tag BestVendor as a ‘discovery engine for business apps’ and leave it at that. But BestVendor goes beyond that and that’s what we will see here. The service is in beta, but it looks good from its landing page onwards.

Best Work Apps and More at BestVendor

Like a lot of other recommendation sites, BestVendor too brings the wisdom of the crowds to help you narrow down the right web services, cloud apps, and software. BestVendor’s speciality is that it focuses on business needs. With the feedback from people who have actually used an app, you can go ahead and confidently make your decision to try out an app and decide if you want to purchase it or not.

BestVendor saves you a lot of time and also serves as a social networking tool through the apps you share or read being recommended by others.

The 3 Step Approach to Find the Best Business Solutions

The sign-up page itself asks you to hit the ground running by asking you to share 3 favorite web services, cloud apps, or software. You will notice the type of software keeps changing from invoicing to project management…and more. The field is like a search engine that suggests as you type apps to recommend.

You can sign-in now into the beta with LinkedIn or an email ID. The LinkedIn ID helps to pull in your professional profile into BestVendor. This is the detailed profile screen you get to see within a second of the sign-in and you can see why mating your LinkedIn account helps to give you a bigger picture thanks to the business/work solutions your professional network could be using.

You have to keep on building your profile to hit better accuracy with the software recommendations. That can wait as I start exploring what the stream and community is sharing. But if you are in a hurry, jump straight to where it displays job functions and says – Click on your job function to get app recommendations. Let’s say that I am looking for Design & Creative solutions.

Whoa! That’s quite a list and well categorized at that. Now, one has to just burrow to the specific one. You can add your feedback and also build up your watch list with a click.

Or you can go ahead and click on it to see what others are saying about the tool. This is where you can not only read what others are saying about the particular software or business solution but also put in a word of your own. Also notice where the community has placed the solution among others of its kind with a rank.

The Value of Crowd Wisdom

The comments and feedback are a rich source of information. It’s not only the opinion, but also the professional profile of the person giving it that matters here. If the feedback is detailed enough, you can see how the person uses the app and in what kind of environment. You can also browse the list of apps the person uses for more hints and recommendations.

Explore People and Companies

This gives you a more accurate way to match your business to the community at BestVendor. You can drill down by Industry, Location, and Company Size. Again, the utility of connecting your LinkedIn account becomes apparent because you can click on the People like me checkbox and laser focus the recommendations.

Discovering the Right App Is Productivity Multiplied

A discovery and recommendation service specifically for apps is a needed resource. The sheer number of software, cloud services, and mobile apps, are making things easier…and more difficult for us at the same time. BestVendor tries to mow through the clutter and give us the app we (and our business) is looking for in double quick time. All with the help of people who are actually using it.

Can we find you on BestVendor? Tell us if BestVendor itself is an online solution worth knowing about.

Enter Vifinition, a spiritual successor of the original Urban Dictionary that actually uses videos for its definitions. Better yet, they are videos chosen from the Internet by users themselves, putting a dual crowd-sourcing spin on the entire operation .

Vifine Just About Anything

The makers of Vifinition are all about letting you “vifine” your world, defining the word “vifinition” itself as “a video definition of just about anything”. Better yet, the alternate definition is “a consequence of being creative and unproductive simultaneously”. Sadly, that is the story of my life.

From the get-go, you’ll see Vifinition Of The Day as soon as you arrive on the homepage of this website (which has great potential to become something very big). For example, say that today’s word is “golf“. Well, based on what I found, the vifinition is an entire comedy routine by Robin Williams on golf. Seems pretty simple, right?

Furthermore, since you are (as far as I know) a user, you can submit videos to Vifinition. The way this is done is fairly simple. Browse YouTube, find something that correlates with the word at hand, and simply submit it. Heck, if you feel like getting a little crazy, you could actually make videos yourself. I don’t think that necessarily violates anything, and it may even make Vifinition a little more interesting.

Browse The Vifinition Video Dictionary

Alright, as with any review I do of a website, it’s time to decide whether or not the search function of Vifinition is usable. Well, what’s the verdict? Nothing fancy is added to it, and nothing is missing – Vifinition got it right. Right now, since the site is in its early stages, there won’t be as many results as I’d like to be, but that’s because the entire site is dependent on its users. You might want to get in there and help them out.

Along with the search function, there is an alphabetical legend that you can use to browse the site quite easily. Click the letter of the word you are looking for, and voila, you instantly have a video that defines your world. Furthermore, there’s also a random vifinition feature (which I believe every site like Vifinition should have).

Rate Your Favorites

In a similar fashion to Reddit, you can vote vifinitions up or down depending on how relevant they are. This is yet another feature that keeps the users in charge of the entire thing, and as far as functionality goes, it keeps all the definitions fresh and current. Speaking of current, a lot of the definitions seem to correlate with recent real-world events, so watch for that when you visit.

As a note, since the site is totally user-generated, you may or may not run across material that could be deemed offensive. However, as with the case of Tagdef and Urban Dictionary, this is not surprising. Furthermore, since the videos found on this site are from YouTube, it’s not like you wouldn’t be able to see them anyway. Vifinition does a very good job of keeping the site unbiased and embraces freedom of speech, but I’m not entirely clear on all of its moderation policies for more extreme cases.

Conclusion

As a video-maker myself, I think Vifinition is a pretty darn awesome little thing. It has great potential to go beyond the novelty of being a video dictionary, and it could actually become a resource that is incredibly extensive. As a reminder, Vifinition is still in the early stages of development, but it needs people like you to help it fulfill its own destiny. If all goes well, I envision it as becoming some kind of futuristic library (but we really need some holograms first… perhaps it could become Holofinition?)

What other sites do you know that are like Vifinition? How have you made use of Vifinition? Tell us what you think about it in the comments.

If you have burning questions like these, or simply want to offer your advice or expertise or share opinions online, there is a website and smart phone app devoted explicitly to asking and giving opinions. It is called, Opinionaided.

Opinionaided was developed, in 2010, by Kurani Interactive, with “the goal of helping people get quick opinions, in real time, while they were shopping.” Now as an iPhone and Android app, it’s a lot easier to add and give feedback.

The features and simple set up of the application are very intuitive. You can start using the app even before you complete your profile.

Ask for Opinions

Asking for opinions in Opinionaided consist of mainly “Thumbs up,” “Thumbs off”, or “Neutral” questions. The app’s menu consists of the Homepage where you select to either, Ask for Opinions, or Give Your Opinion. Or get written feedback. You can also ask open-ended questions and get comments.

To help facilitate getting responses, you can also add a background picture or image that responders can refer directly to. In my brief experience with the app, I voted on three posts in which members simply asked for an opinion of a piece of art.

Unfortunately, Opinionaided is not set up for asking multiple-choice questions. You can, however, turn the question into a multiple-choice by, for example, writing “TU for iPhone, or TD for Android?” (TU=Thumbs up and TD=Thumbs down.)

After developing a question, you select a category to put it in. These categories include, Relationships, Technology and Gadgets, Sports and Activities, Gaming, Business and Finance, Religion and Science.

A few of the advanced features for asking questions might be overlooked. You can choose not to post your question for public feedback, and instead ask it to your list of friends and contacts. You can also post your question for Males Only, or Females Only, as well as post them on your Facebook and Twitter account.

As I was preparing to write this article, I posted this quick question: “I have the iPhone 4. Should I buy the 4S?” Within a few minutes, while I provided votes and comments to other questions, I received over thirty-five votes, and several written comments, for my question. Of the fifty-five votes I ended up getting, 33% gave Thumbs up, and 67%, Thumbs down.

Another neat feature of this process is that you can give responders a gold star for their comment. This is especially useful for those who take the time to give good advice.

Give Your Opinion

Giving your opinion on stated questions is very easy. You simply vote up or down, or neutral, with the option of including a written comment. Unfortunately, there is no way to not respond to a question and skip to the next one, except to exit out and back into the Vote menu.

Fortunately, you can filter the type of questions you want to respond to by category.

Results

Another menu section is devoted to the results of your questions, and the tallied responses and comments to queries you responded to. You can select to review “All Votes” or “Just Comments. You can also click on a responder’s name and reply to his or her comment, which can start a conversation.

Back in March of 2011, Opinionaided raised $1 million to expand its mobile real-time feedback service. This signals much more to come for this social network service. While some users might find many of the questions trivial, if they are looking for something more serious, all they need to do is ask those type of questions.

Opinionaided looks to be similar to Quora and Stack Overflow. Let us know if you use these or other similar sites.

When we compare two things alongside each other, we are also looking for opinions and recommendations that will make decisions easier. Enter Swayable.com, a web application that takes this very thought and gives it a social spin. Swayable taps your social network and makes it easier to get feedback in almost real-time thanks to the web and iPhone app.

But let’s not get swayed before we explore Swayable in detail.

Swayable Defined

Swayable’s are little ‘voting units’ you make for comparing two things side by side. You can use images snapped with a camera phone or link to ones online. Sharing the ‘Swayables’ with your friends in real time via social networks, email, or SMS helps you get feedback. The vote-of-confidence from your friends then helps you make decisions on the go. It’s all very simple really.

How Can Swayable Help Me Out?

Let’s try describing a cottage on the lakeside and a beach in words and pitch them against each other. Words will probably fail or at least they won’t be so effective. Snap or link the two pictures (with the panorama if possible), create a Swayable…and hey presto, the decision where to take your next vacation just became easier.

Ask your girlfriend or wife to create a quick Swayable when she bombards you with question on which dress to buy. If your opinion gets taken that is!

Swayable also lets you tap into the wisdom of the crowds. Don’t we see its power on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and discussion boards! Our closest friends may not be with us when we need to make a quick decision; Swayable brings them just a bit closer.

A Swayable in Action

You can start creating your own with a free registration. Remember, you can access a Swayable with its iPhone app along with the online site. You can choose to Sway or Get Swayed. You have loads of categories to choose from. But you can dive straight into creating your own Swayable by clicking on a green Create your Swayable button.

As a section of the screenshot above shows, creating a Swayable is a no-brainer. The four step process simply involves uploading an image from your computer or grabbing an image from the web (you can do an image search too) – asking your social circle a question – selecting how frequently you would like to be notified of Sways & comments and which category you want to assign your Swayable to. Choosing to display your Swayable for any user opens it up to the crowd and is better in my opinion.

Here’s a Swayable I created asking what to buy – an Android smartphone or an iPhone.

Get Swayed – Swayables You Can Use Right Now

Maybe, the question I wanted answered for myself has already been asked previously. Publicly listed Swayables is the place you can dig it out. There’s quite a large collection on offer but here a search engine would have helped to trawl through all the stuff. Manually going through each Swayable is a chore. You can of course, put in your ‘Sways’ and see which way people are voting.

Swayable has lots of practical uses. You can set up quick web design mock-ups and ask for feedback. You can use it as a quickie recommendation site for any product that’s out there. You can also use it to ask the general crowd which girl to date if your guts are up for it.

Comparisons are always on. But are you Swayed? Check out Swayable and tell us how you would like to use it…and do you think it’s a quick enough feedback tool for you.

What do YOU think about crowdsourcing? Let us know your opinions in the comments.