My favorite example of collective intelligence producing something useful out of many ordinary actions is reCaptcha.

JavaScript has objects and what is called prototypal inheritance, but it does not have built-in support for many features provided by other languages. In particular, it does not have built-in support for classes and instances. Nor does it have built-in support for methods of one class to call super-class methods.

Talk About WordPres Fan Boy by cogdogblog

It seems the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2008: Innovation Competition is in need of entries, so I had quick a half hour hack around the University of Aberdeen newsfeeds to see if I could come up with anything interesting (Brian Kelly hinted that if I used any OU info sources, no-one would take
prototype SOLR widget I built in 30 minutes in Sproutbuilder. Cool tool, though of course all sorts of issues with who owns service, reliability, etc