The two versions of the photo below are a great testament to the power of virtual community and user-generated content, and I'll tell you why:

The photo on the left is the original, and was posted last weekend by a member of Reddit. "My brother and his fiance died in a car crash a few months ago," he wrote, "and I just ran across this picture of them on the first day they met. It would be really cool if someone could try to restore it, so I could have it printed."

More than one person tried to restore it -- perhaps several dozen Redditors did so, putting what was probably hundreds of total hours into the effort with Photoshop and other post-processing tools. To judge by the quality of the output, many of them are almost certainly graphic artists and other professionals. Above right is the submission by "colacube", whose submission garnered the most karma points from other Redditors. (But there are many more submissions of roughly equal quality.)

The improved photo itself is impressive enough, but consider just how many other amazing elements came together to make it possible, and what it says about the power of virtual, pseudonymous community: