If L.A. Fashion Week's eco-friendly green clothing lines have taught us anything, it's that we shouldn't ignore the collective power of the crowd. This insight has long been the cornerstone of business plans that depend on "fractional ownership", but with consumers facing seemingly insurmountable problems like a crappy economy and a crap-filled environment, marketers are finding new opportunities for mixing it up with the masses. By augmenting consumers' natural inclinations toward collaboration with advances in online and wireless technologies, a number of "why didn't I think of that" startups have struck it big by mining for opportunities in crowds.

The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can't keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It's more crowd mining than crowd sourcing.

Much of the pioneering work in this type of Internet surveillance has come in the public health field, tracking disease. Google Flu Trends, which uses a cloud of keywords to determine how sick a population is, tracks epidemiological data from the Centers for Disease Control.

Now, let's go back to crowd mining: when co-creating, co-funding, co-buying, co-designing, co-managing *anything* with 'crowds', the emphasis in 2008 will move from just getting the masses in, to mining those crowds for the rough and polished diamonds.