The Wisdom of the Crowds Or The Tyranny of the Mob

What’s with all this collective intelligence web 2.0 stuff anyway?

David Smith, Business Innovations Manager

Is Harriet Klausner real?•She has her own website: http://harrietklausner.wwwi.com/

•She has a RealName™ - an Amazon ‘Badge’ that indicates that Amazon has validated the identity of the person (via credit card)

•The Wall Street Journal wrote about her http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006483

•But if she writes a review for every book she reads (2 per day in her own words) then it’s taken her over 17 years to compile the 12,000 reviews on Amazon.

•Amazon was founded in 1995…

•Every book she reviews seems to get 4 or 5 stars (out of five)

•And in one six day period – I counted over 89 book reviews from her

In which Digg gets gamed

““We’ve given the word mob a bad name”We’ve given the word mob a bad name”Dr HibbertDr Hibbert

Can a crowd be wise?Yes: If these conditions are met

● Diversity of opinion/knowledge: each crowd member needs to have some form of private information about the matter at hand.

● Independence: individuals in the crowd need to draw their own conclusions without influence from the rest of the crowd.

● Decentralization: Crowd members can apply local knowledge and thinking to their solution to the problem – think specialization.

● Aggregation: Collating the above and getting to a sensible collective decision (this is the REALLY hard one!).

Good examples of ‘Wise Crowds’

Google’s web index – powered by Pagerank™ which is powered by… YOU

The Stock Market (mostly – bubbles and runs are what happens when the crowd stops working to the principles outlined before) – Note the stock market performs well over time

Open source software such as Firefox, Linux, Apache

What about Publishers?

Remember – Aggregation…

Without this, the crowd is not wise.

Also – How long have you got to wait for a crowd to come up with the ‘wise’ answer? Crowds work at their own pace (peer reviewers anyone?).

‘The Bottom is Not Enough’ – find this on the wiki a great perspective.

And read the book! long form content – not a feature of crowdsourced material (at least, not yet)

Questions?