More style advice, courtesy of the crowds

It was roughly a year ago that we first wrote about RedesignMe, a Dutch site that taps the collective wisdom of the crowds to improve consumer products. Now, reflecting the notion of the self as a product equally in need of marketing and refinement, we have RestyleMe, a site that generates crowdsourced advice on personal style. We’ve actually written about two separate sites in the last month or so that bring crowdsourcing into the personal realm–SideTaker, for relationship advice, and checkyourimage.com, for image appraisal. Along similar lines, RestyleMe.com is a style advice website that allows users to rate other people’s style or fashion sense. Advice seekers begin by uploading a photo to the site and submitting it for appraisal. Unlike rating systems that provide just a general, overall indication of the success of a person’s look, however, RestyleMe allows users to flag specific parts of a person’s look–hair, makeup, or even tattoos–they think the person should keep or change. Clothing items can be tagged by styles or brands, and pinpoint photo marking allows reviewers to flag a specific feature on a subject’s image with a single click and give precise ratings about that aspect of their style, along with explanatory comments. A summary bar graph synthesizes voting results, and advice seekers can filter it by gender, age or location. Still in beta, California-based RestyleMe also includes a variety of social networking features, and is free for registered users. Friends may or may not tell the raw, unfiltered truth, but the crowds excel at telling it like it is. It’s not hard to imagine taking this one step further with audio and video, inviting the crowds to evaluate your speaking voice, your walking gait, the way you dance, or even your style of interacting. Entering a brave new world of self-image refinement! Spotted by: Bjarke Svendsen