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the wisdom of crowds

why the many are smarter than the few

James Surowiecki
 

The masses are revolting ... but are they right?  This book strikes right into the core of web 2.0 and social networking.  Not so much the technologies at play, but more about the potential (or not) about where they take us.  The central premise : the power of crowds distilled into consensus will (if given the right conditions) lead to better and more accurate outcomes than so called 'expert opinion'.

Case in point number 1 (maybe) is Google, with its aggregation of billions of contributions from the global crowd that inhabits http://www.  What is interesting as web 2.0 matures is whether Google truly stands the test of time.  Sure, it beats what we had before (er, not a lot) but does it really embrace the true collective intellect of those that create web pages - whether valuable, transient, corrupt, misleading, vital or otherwise - to produce better results.  Is the wisdom of crowds simply the law of averages in action?

OK, enough nay saying.  The 'wisdom of crowds' points us all in an interesting direction of travel in the context of social networking.  Joe public beats Joe Inc or Joe PhD everytime, right?  The deeper question that this books poses for the Rock 'n' Roll iMaginations crowd is how do we best cultivate and harvest that wisdom in a way that goes beyond algorithmic or rote processing of HTML code?  How can we harness it in a way that demonstrably supports intellectual, democratic and economic well being?  How do the crowds themselves participate in a meaningful way, with reciprocity for their 'wisdom'?  And whatever happened to the evils of "drafting (or design) by committee" and the axiomatic "too many cooks spoil the broth"?

>  Discuss this book in the freshest air forum

>  Read about the dangers of misinterpretation of The Wisdom of Crowds in this blog article on "The Dumbness of Crowds".

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