The internet is the undisputed home of all things weird and wonderful- so it’s hardly surprising that the wide variety of Crowdsourcing ideas range from the fantastic to the innovative, valuable, pointless (?) and downright bizarre. And the latest Crowdsourced venture to hit the World Wide Web certainly lights up at least one of these categories. Which one largely depends on your personal standpoint…

If getting stoned is your thing and you’ve ever wondered whether you’re being charged the appropriate  black-market local rate for marijuana, you could probably do a lot worse than consult the actively Crowdsourced map ,‘PriceofWeed’, to formulate a better idea.

The site allows users to anonymously record the price/weight ratio, quality and location of their purchased weed, and the data is plotted onto a worldwide Google map. PriceofWeed records the mean number from the submissions and indicates the average price for the plant in each city. As of September 15, the website has had more than 3000 submissions from across the globe, ranging from Cardiff, Istanbul, Adelaide and San Antonio, Texas.

So what’s to be made of this hazy data? Well, using London as a high-profile case study, the website’s survey of 18 people indicates ‘high quality’ weed costs an average of $248.15 per ounce, ‘medium quality’ $243.27 (from a survey of 29), while ‘low quality’ costs around $153.38 (admittedly from a survey of just four). This compares favourably to a number of American states (according to Time magazine) – the price of ‘high quality’ marijuana in North Carolina costs an average of $447 per ounce.

Beyond the obvious uses of this Crowdsourced data, the website could provide a useful research tool. Indeed, the website has made a deliberate point of identifying a range of ‘social metrics’ in order to gain worldwide social views on marijuana (such as local laws, social acceptability etc)- although researchers will have to pay a fee for this data.

And the stats may become more relevant in the coming weeks as California await the result of ‘Proposition 19.’ on November 2nd 2010. If the proposition is approved, the American state could become the first jurisdiction in the world to legalise, regulate and tax the consumption, production and distribution of marijuana.

Whether supporters or detractors of the bill incoporate the website’s statistics as part of their argument is another question altogether. The PriceofWeed blog claims it has increased its statistical reliability as “the average prices for different regions have now been corrected for statistical outliers. This removes potentially fake entries that skew the prices, thus providing more accurate estimates.”

However, you would have to assume that once local suppliers become privy to the website, they may feel inclined to record a joint series of inflated prices to ensure higher sales. Furthermore, the data provided in some of the cities/states is scarce at present, which would make it to difficult to prove/disprove theories one way or another.

Nonetheless, the website is another indicator that the public are willing to place their faith in the credibility of the crowd’s wisdom as a barometer of information. We are indeed heading towards the Participation Economy- but expect a few more potty ideas to creep in along the way…