Shot down in flames
Well, the wisdom of crowds debate rages on. As Marc quite rightly points out in the comments to my last post, Google rankings depending on in-bound links means that the crowd in question has already qualified itself as a content producer rather than a consumer: it isn’t “the masses”. In the meantime, David points to the rather unwise hierarchy that exists in many crowds such as your class at school.
I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel. Here’s my effort at distinguishing between wise and unwise crowds, technological and otherwise. I’ll start with some examples of crowds that, in my humble opinion, work well and those that don’t to try to keep things practical. Some of the examples are very subjective and some from the book, but hopefully there’ll be a consensus of agreement.
Good crowds:
Google, juries, democratic government, jelly bean estimators, submarine finders, last.fm*, OSS developers, e-bay sellers, betters on horse races
* it’s an internet music community and radio player that recommends music by looking at what you play, then comparing it with the collections of the rest of the community. It can basically form a profile of the sort of stuff you like and find what people who like that also like.
Bad crowds:
ravening mobs, rioters, design by committee, phone polls in tabloid papers, votes on single issues by the entire population, traffic gridlocks
What are the distinctions between them? In the ‘good’ examples, everyone is (a) qualified intellectually or otherwise to “vote” (b) acting in their own self-interest (c) acting as intelligently as they are able and (d) acting independently - apart from juries in some respects, but people on juries presumably feel a responsibility to act as intelligently as they can, whether that’s through following others or taking a lead.
The internet, being what it is, doesn’t always allow this ‘good’ behaviour to operate - any look at the Google Zeitgeist will show you that you probably don’t have too much in common with the majority (at least if you’re reading this). Very good Web 2.0 projects, and I still count both Google and e-bay as qualifying for this, will allow for the correct conditions to form. I think that the news and bookmark sharing/voting sites can work, but maybe the groups forming them need to be far more granular?
OK. Back to cool links tomorrow, eh?
