This story is about a week old now, but the disappearance of computer scientist Jim Gray sparked a remarkable social collaboration led by Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. TechCrunch details the story here, so I don’t want to rob them of their deserved readers.

But the side commentary concerns the power a globally connected network can have.  It’s unlikely we’ll be able to find Mr. Gray, even with everyone looking at 5-10 satellite photos.  But this kind of application can be taken national for missing chlildren, or down to the neighborhood level for lost dogs. Using this technology, it’s really not hard to forsee us using our 5-10 minutes of goof off time to work on a complex problem with 100,000 other people.

But on this project, we hope someone finds something of note in the photographs, and Mr. Gray can be found.