Founded by a savvy venture capitalist and a team of computer whizzes, Allvoices.com is a website site with a grand goal – to be a platform for work by citizen journalists from every corner of the globe.

As the site’s promotional patter puts it, Allvoices “is a global community that shares news, videos, images and opinions tied to news events and people. It is the first true people’s media.”

The genesis of the San Francisco-based site seems no less grand or cosmopolitan; venture capitalist Amra Tareen, a Pakistani native, traveled to her home country after a devastating 2005 earthquake.

Wanting to share her impressions of the disaster, but lacking a platform to do so, the idea for the site was born.

As Tareen put it in an interview I did with her, "Allvoices believes that every citizen has the capability to be a reporter, and comprehensive global & local coverage can only be powered by citizens. Allvoices is a new low-cost model for both citizens and “professional” journalists based on community and technology that provides scale and a broader scope driven by economics."

She added: "We use a community of contributors to cover local to global news on multiple topics; we like to think we have 6 billion potential correspondents."

Put simply, Allvoices allows people worldwide to submit stories, photos and video, then combines those submissions with related articles aggregated from mainstream news sources.

So a recent blogpost comparing Iran and its missile tests to North Korea was surrounded by other posts of a similar nature, as well as relevant mainstream news stories.

The idea has garnered some support from investors: Tareen has raised about $4.5 million in seed money and is looking for more.

Allvoices claims about 3 million unique visitors per month, and an incentive program offers contributors the chance to earn money for their submissions.

The hope is that eventually the site will generate revenue from advertising and syndication.

Big Ambitions Tempered By Growing Pains Along the Way

The goal of being a platform for citizen journalists from around the globe is both ambitious and laudable. Allvoices has certainly set its sights high, and on several visits I found some interesting content.

But with only computers and no human editor to monitor content (indeed, the site touts the fact that it is "unedited by humans,") I also found mistakes. For instance, the headline of the aforementioned Iran article read: “Iran Pulls A Noth Korea.”

(There's plenty of kooky stuff as well. A search turned up a number of articles on the site comparing President Obama to the antichrist, for instance.)

I was also troubled by the way Allvoices aggregates mainstream news content. In my view, news aggregators should always have links for individual stories point directly to the original article and the news organization that produced it.

However, clicking a link to a mainstream news story on Allvoices often takes you to another page on the site that merely summarizes the story, and finding the link to the original source material can be downright confusing.

Even with its problems, I believe Allvoices is a citizen journalism site worth watching. My recommendation for Allvoices? Hire a real journalist to keep an eye out for the kind of troubling content I mentioned, and post some basic guidelines for contributors on how they can produce quality citizen journalism.

Follow me on Facebook , Twitter or Google Plus , and sign up for my journalism newsletter.