Winter break is always one of my most sacred times to read and absorb new information from news, Twitter, books and journals. Some is purely for fun and entertainment, while I also try to bring in something to push myself professionally and just to get to asking more questions. One book I picked up this year was The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. This book focuses on decision making trends of the individual, groups, corporations and government institutions and how this process is carried out. While not specifically focused on education, The Wisdom of Crowds has many applications to the world of K-20 education and its evolution in the future. Surowiecki’s  collection of extensive research, coupled with his easy to digest writing style, makes this book as fascinating read on the possibilities of educational leadership reform. Throughout the book I found many parallels to how I, and many others that I know, use their PLNs (personal learning networks). When faced with a challenge in my classroom, with colleagues or in my school, I often consult the diverse backgrounds, experiences and opinions in my PLN. Their input and ideas, as well as their willingness to challenge mine for the benefit of the right decision, are critical in my own professional decision making now. Maybe I should start calling it my DMN (decision making network) and it will catch on!

Today I am thinking about the wisdom of crowds versus that of experts.  The wisdom of crowds is typical known as statistical groups.  The theory holds that large groups of people (the larger the better) are statistically more accurate than experts.  This is ONLY true when any one person within the group is likely to be more than 50% right.

This principle underlies the philosophy of our democratic system.  So my question is what role do experts and/or librarian play in this type of information system?  Do we provide a check/balance to the crowd? 

I guess from my point-of-view, I believe that people are good.  That they want to add to the information flow in an honest manner.  That they don’t change wiki pages they know nothing about.

Before the Internet if you wanted to find a rip-roaring science fiction novel to read you’d flip through the books at your favorite bookstore and hope to stumble upon the next mind-blowing sci-fi novel to change your life.  Or you’d ask your best buds about which books knocked them into orbit.  True fans subscribed to science fiction magazines and fanzines, reading all the reviews so as to maintain their status as the Sci-Fi guru at their local Slan shack.

Back in the 1980s I wondered if there was a better way, and developed a statistical system that I wrote about for a fanzine Lan’s Lantern.  I describe the process at my Classics of Science Fiction website.  When the world wide web came along I put my lists online, and eventually revised them three times.  The latest list, Classics of Science Fiction by Rank, is now several years old.

Today I discovered SFFMeta.com, a site created by Eric Bouchard, that also applies statistics to the task of finding a great science fictional read.  Think of it as Rotten Tomatoes for science fiction, fantasy and horror books.  SFFMeta is the newest in a succession of websites that use statistics for identifying the best science fiction books.  An early endeavor was Tristrom Cooke’s The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List, which is now maintained by a new list maker.  Years later came Sci-Fi Lists Top Science Fiction, an excellent polling type site from the land down under.  I wish their creators would take credit and write about developing their systems.

Each statistician of reading has come up with a different method for identifying good reads. All of us look for ways to cash in on the wisdom of crowds theory.  Bouchard’s site is built on the idea that collectively, a group of current book reviewers, will spot the best reads.  I love his simple and elegant web design.  And it will be one that will evolve with wisdom over time. 

Bouchard assembles lists of reviewed books from online reviewing sites.  This produces worthy information now, but not deep enough to show wisdom just yet.  In other words, his samples are too small.  Rotten Tomatoes gets over a hundred reviewers for each film, but SFFMeta is limited by surveying a much smaller industry, and many books on his list have just 1 review. 

SFFMeta’s 90 day lists are a helpful indicator now, but their all-time best books are iffy.  It might take SFFMeta 5-15 years to gather the data using their methods to show inherent wisdom in identifying all-time classics because they have to wait for old books to be reviewed in new editions.  And be reviewed in numbers more significant than new books.

Their best lists now are the 2008 and 2007 summary lists.  Statistically, it would be wonderful if we could compare them to sales figures, and other annual best lists, because it would further reinforce the wisdom of crowds concept. I’m looking forward to the 2009 list.

I made my lists before the Internet was well known, and I had to combine the wisdom of fan polls with the wisdom of cross-tabbing critic’s recommended reading lists, along with award lists, and other criteria.   We came up with 28 lists, and to get on the final list, a book had to be on at least 7 of those 28 lists. 

If SFFMeta could find more reviewers and up their green cutoff to 5 reviewers their accuracy would improve dramatically I think.  It would also help if they could factor in other indicators besides reviewers – such as sales numbers, awards and nominations, Google citation numbers, and critical articles, foreign editions, audio book editions, for instance.  

SFFMeta also faces the problem that most of their cited reviewers are either overly kind, generous, or just plain hate to trash a book.  One positive review can get a book on the list, but it takes three reviews to get a highlighted green score.  Because their site is new, their 90 day list has only two green highlighted titles.  Their all-time list covers 100 books, with all getting the green rating, and one book having 14 reviews.  Statistically that’s better than the 90 day list, but not good enough for identifying true classics.

As their database of reviewed books grow, I’d like to see SFFMeta allow the viewer to manipulate the lists – for example, to see a 90 day list made of books getting more than 3 reviews, or more than 5, etc.  You can eyeball this now, but their programmer is obviously talented enough to do this for us.  I hope SFFMeta can find many more review sites too.  Here is their current list.  Print reviewers, I encourage you to reprint your reviews on the web if possible.

Bookmarks Magazine collects statistics on books via reviewers too, but uses print reviewers.  In their annual best of the year grid.  Their standout books will have 7 or more reviews, and the best of the best will have 12 or more, from the reviewers they use.  This illustrates why writers lust after reviews – any kind of attention helps.  There are so many books published that it’s hard for most books to get noticed at all, and for some to get noticed by several reviewers is a triumph. 

SFFMeta is a dream come true for genre writers because its results further emphasizes the best reviewed books.  SFFMeta is also a positive force for book reviewers.  Be sure and click the titles to drill down to where you can read the reviews.  There’s a major amount of work that’s gone into this site and I hope it becomes a huge success.  Hopefully, SFFMeta will bring more readers to the reviewers too, and that should help educate the audience for SF/F/H.  It should promote the value of reviewers and maybe bring more into the field. 

I’ve always dreamed of doing something more with my lists, but it’s so much damn work.  The latest books on my site are three from 1992.  I’d love to find enough lists to make it practical to identify books through 2000, but that will be hard.  I have 28 lists now.  If I could find 5-7 newer lists it would catch a lot of new books, but if I left the cutoff at 7 the final list would be far too long.  I’d need to make the cutoff 8-10 lists, and that makes it even harder for new titles to get listed.  My system has it’s limits.  It tends to recognize the very best of the very best of older books in the bell of the curve, dropping older titles that are being forgotten, and making it very hard for newer titles to be recognized.

If I used a 10 list cutoff, my current list would be 116 books.  If I use 11 lists, I’d get 94 books.  By using 7 lists, I get 193 books, far too many to be a real Top 100 SF Books, but look what gets left off (scroll down to #94 and see).  The Top 100 Sci-Fi Books site have a great overlap with my list and they do have a few newer titles.  When SFFMeta collects enough reviews and start matching those two lists it will be a powerful system with a lot of built in wisdom.

SFFMeta, if it becomes popular, should help sell books.  I watch way more little movies after the advent of Rotten Tomatoes.  I was overwhelmingly surprised by how many unknown authors (to me) I saw listed on SFFMeta.  For old SF farts, stuck in the 1950s science fiction world of Heinlein-Clarke-Asimov triumvirate, it’s quite a revelation.  Using the wisdom of crowds should push book reviewing into a new paradigm, but it will make it even harder for a new writer to break in.  One book review will sell books, but now buyers will expect books to be positively reviewed from a database of reviewers.  This could become a dangerous trend.

Books have always competed in a survival of the fittest competition, but now the internet will push that competition to newer heights.  My Classics of Science Fiction web site gets on average 92 hits a day – not that many, but it builds up over time for people looking for a list of SF books to read.  I’ve gotten lots of emails over the years from people telling me they use my list to find new books to try out.  This helps maintain fans for these older books.  SFFMeta will also create a momentum for popular new titles, and hopefully it will help find new readers for the genre by helping them to discover exciting books.

Will the wisdom of crowds increase the number of overall readers though?  Harry Potter books certainly got more kids to read for pleasure, but I’ve often heard kids say they couldn’t find anything exciting after HP, and gave up reading.  It’s hard to find books to love, so systems that identify top reads should create new bookworms.  Let’s hope so.  Be sure and add SFFMeta to your Blogroll.

JWH – 12/20/9

I’ve never been a big one for crowds, but today I’m joining the ranks of those talking about Seth Godin’s latest endeavor, a free downloadable e-book called What Matters Now, a compilation of ideas and quotes from seventy “big thinkers” of our time.

The contributors range from Elizabeth Perkins (author of Eat, Pray, Love) and Oprah Magazine columnist Martha Beck to business innovators like 37signals founder Jason Fried and Guy Kawasaki, with a little Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Pink thrown in for good measure. No matter where your interests lie, you’ll find more than a few nuggets of wisdom here to mull over and share.

If a book sounds too time-consuming, the good news is that the format is actually more like that of a slide deck, with one page devoted to each contributor and topic, making it easily consumable in small bites. I’ve posted a few of my favorites here, but the entire e-book is worth exploring on your own when you have (make) the time.

On:

GUMPTION: “These corners we paint ourselves into, it’s no way to live.” – Novelist J.C. Hutchins

PASSION: “You grow (and thrive!) by doing what excites you and what scares you everyday, not by trying to find your passion.” – Derek Sivers, entrepreneur & programmer

CHANGE: “Stop agonizing about what’s not working. Instead, ask yourself, “What’s working well, right now, and how can I do more of it?”” – Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick

AUTONOMY: “Management isn’t natural.” – Daniel H. Pink, author

POWER: “Stop waiting around for bosses and companies to get better and complaining about how are you treated. Build the skills—and use them—that will permit you to create the environment in which you want to live.” – Jeffrey Pfeffer, author and professor at Stanford Business School

SOCIAL SKILLS: “I have really bad social skills, so I am constantly noticing how the whole world revolves around social skills.” – Penelope Trunk, founder of BrazenCareerist.com and author of blog.penelopetrunk.com

I’M SORRY: “There’s never really a great way to apologize, but there are plenty of terrible ways.” – 37signals founder Jason Fried

See more on Seth’s blog at: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/what-matters-now-get-the-free-ebook.html

While media budgets are squeezed still further as we trudge onward under the cloud of recession, trillionesque debt and the massive public spending cuts gathering on the horizon, the focus on social media ROI grows ever sharper, but less energy is expended looking at the benefits that focused online communities can bring to businesses.

Communities for not-for-profits and membership bodies have a slightly different flavour to those developed for commercial entities. While commercial brands answer to shareholders or private owners, NFPs and membership bodies exist for the benefit of their constituents. There is already a genuine, real-world community or shared interest in place – just as there isn’t (really) between me and say, Sainsbury’s – so a digital community is a natural fit.

But that doesn’t mean it’s any simpler, nor is the transition to deeper member or supporter engagement any less challenging for the organising bodies than a renewed focus on customer engagement is for businesses. There is a lot of overlap. An event I attended at the Law Society on 6th October, “Surviving in a Recession – What Member Organisations can Learn from the Commercial World” addressed the challenges and opportunities in this area.

One of the things I liked about it was the way it set online communities in a longer timeframe than we’re used to talking about. Many membership bodies have been around for 50-200 years. Most started out when enthusiastic and committed people come together informally – usually in a bar room, hotel or coffee house – to improve and professionalise emerging crafts and knowledge.

Fast forward to now, and these bodies occupy grand buildings, wield influence with governments and business, and provide letters after your name. But are they achieving their original aims? How close are they to their members today, and how can a geographically dispersed membership benefit from the knowledge and experience of their fellow members and the wider interested audience? In other words, can we re-boot the association?

The event was co-hosted by Sift – who are the technology and consultancy supplier for CIMAsphere, the online community I manage – and Madgex. Rather than reading a re-cap of the discussion, you can watch the presentations from two of the speakers that morning.

First up is Adam Cranfield, my former colleague, who was at the time Digital Media Manager at CIMA.

The second presentation is from Lawrence Clarke, Head of Consultancy at Sift. Sadly you can’t see his slides in the video, nor Adam’s in his. But the stand-out points for me were Lawrence’s thoughts on the tendency of subscription-based associations to rely on inertia and top-down, one-to-many communications, and how that is being undermined by the connectedness and transparency the web brings on the one hand, and recessionary pressures on the other.

That talk is a companion piece to this post Lawrence wrote a month earlier on the Sift blog. Highly recommended.

ComMetrics is a social media analytics company, a division of CyTRAP Labs GmbH. ComMetrics is well-known in the industry, including its FT ComMetrics Blog Index.

The company published a useful piece, Crowd-wisdom fails businesses. The basic premise is that crowds do not innovate. It’s useful, because it contains both truths and misconceptions about the role of communities in the innovation process.

Let’s break it down.

Innovation via a stadium crowd?

Photo credit: Ian Ransley

The initial point of the post is that “Crowds Innovate – NOT”. And it’s true in its literal sense.

This may be one of my favorite misconceptions about the role of communities in innovation. That crowdsourcing is some sort of mind meld where innovations spring from a collective brain wave.

This quote by ComMetrics both sums up the truth, and the common misconception:

It seems a bit naive to think that going to Dodger Stadium or the LA Coliseum in the hope that crowdsourcing will show people exhibiting the above [innovation] behaviors, and therefore help us innovate faster…

Really now…

Actually, it wouldn’t be naïve if you were soliciting the stadium’s feedback on ways to improve the sport event experience. Understand the different “jobs” the sport event is supposed to do:

• Outlet for aging or non-practicing athletes
• Family adventure
• Business social events and networking

You mean you wouldn’t solicit the stadium crowd for ideas related to what they’d like to see on those fronts? How about their feedback on the stadium management’s and others’ ideas?

The stadium example is a good one, because it offers a chance to parse out the role of crowdsourcing into three dynamics:

1. Crowdsourcing involves collecting ideas in aggregate
2. Community feedback brings a diversity of viewpoints to the ideas
3. Crowdsourcing does mean 100% of the world’s population

Collecting ideas in aggregate. Stop for a moment and consider that. I’m contrasting that view of crowdsourcing from the hivemind singularity that operates off a single brain wave. While the employees of a business have more of a vested in its success, the actual users of a product or service have a pretty good sense of what they want to accomplish.

Diversity of feedback. Research demonstrates the power of information diversity in increasing the quality of ideas. And crowdsourcing is a marvelous way to capture a broad spectrum of opinion and understanding. If you’re going to get a range of opinions, including wild cards that weren’t expecting, soliciting a community’s feedback is a powerful approach.

Crowdsourcing doesn’t mean the whole world. When I read the stadium crowd quote, I get a subtle ‘dis’ in it. Namely, that there some serious nimrods in the crowd, and what the hell would they know about your business? But that’s a stereotype. For instance, look at the open source operating system Linux. Linux is a great example of crowdsourcing. But you’re not going to find me contributing anything there. I have no knowledge, opinion or interest in it. Crowdsourcing attracts parties interested in the product/service being examined. It’d be too demanding to participate otherwise.

The problems with popularity

The ComMetrics post has two separate points around the problems with popularity. First, is the issue of superusers having too much control over crowd opinion:

The notion that a book might be a must-read because it is highly ranked by many on Amazon does not make it Nobel prize material. The earth did not stand still just because Galileo fell out of favor, nor has evolution been shown to be false due to the faith of believers.

Hence, product reviews driven by superusers and crowds who follow just means that the wisdom of crowds can only be conventional. Volume against quality.

The second point is that simple votes don’t provide enough input on an idea’s value:

Thumbs Up or Down works but fails to explain why: Crowds do not drive and bring innovation to successful fruition in the form of a marketable product. Nor are they the best source for assessing quality – the one that shouts the loudest is heard the most.

Nevertheless, crowds can tell you if they like or dislike something.

There are truths in both of these observations. Amazon superusers are the modern equivalent of tastemakers in pre-Internet society. The people the crowd followed to find the best of things, often read in the newspapers. There are cases where the opinion of an A-Lister can have too much sway.

One key difference is this: today, people have to re-earn their influence over time. If over a sustained period someone falls down and no longer looks forward to the fresh, to the new, they lose their influence. The crowd moves on to someone else who is at the leading edge. Humans have a natural affinity for the new.

Perhaps more importantly, one cannot argue that no one has solid authority over a particular innovation domain. We don’t all wake up as blank slates every morning, having to relearn expertise during that day’s work cycle. There are bona fide, honest-to-goodness authorities on subjects who are motivated for improvement.

Which brings me to the second point about simple up-down votes. These votes do provide valuable feedback. You get an early read on what is resonating with the crowd, which is a valuable filter. But they lack nuances that can help identify the best among ideas that are resonating.

Microsoft’s Wilson Haddow’s observation is spot-on. Companies ought to be able to leverage both the wisdom of the crowd in getting feedback, but also leverage the opinion of authorities as well. Going back to what I wrote earlier…

• The crowd can provide ideas in aggregate
• The crowd can collectively weigh in on ideas’ merits
• Individual authorities are generally needed at later stages of evaluation

And the role of these authorities should include finding valuable ideas the crowd overlooks.

In the blog post Corporate Innovation Is Not a Popularity Contest, I argue that binary feedback mechanisms – up-down votes – fall short. They are valuable, but not enough. And this is something Spigit does with its integration of reputation scores into the innovation process.

ComMetrics makes good points here. And kudos to ComMetrics for taking the time to weigh in on this topic. Their post provides a good framework for considering both the problems and opportunities of working with communities in the innovation process.

By Martin Skinner

I noticed this amazing car and fascinating story in the Sunday Times the other day and thought I’d share it with you. The off-roader built tweet by tweet.

It highlights the momentum that crowd sourcing is building up, and suggests it is likely to be much more broadly adopted in the years ahead.

A company called Local Motors in the US has built a car they’ve called the Rally Fighter using open source production techniques. This basically means fans/members of their website have submitted their ideas by email or twitter for every aspect of the car.

Harnessing the wisdom of crowds like this not only helps companies/entrepreneurs provide better products and services but it also guarantees sales. If the customer has invested their time/ideas throughout the development process they are far more likely to buy the end product – there are many reasons for this one of them is because emotionally accepting a loss (writing off any investment) is twice as hard to do as cashing in a profit.

I’ve also recently come across (random connection through Twitter) a superb financial services company called Redington who are doing things very differently (better) and among other things (including Mallow Street) using technology to tune their presentations on-the-fly depending on the active preferences of their audience.

The skill appears to be in the facilitation of open source brainstorming and/or the aggregation of these ideas. At Inspired we’re looking to develop an online/offline community to help investors and their advisors. Ultimately we’d like it to harness decision markets – where a contribution currency will provide a non-financial incentive and encourage participation. Jaime Steele may have already solved the contribution/karma currency bit for us.

Exciting and innovative times ahead. In my humble opinion social media really is the biggest shift since the industrial revolution and the pace of progress will clearly accelerate in the years ahead.

What do you think will be be the most exciting developments in 2010?

Martin

In my first corporate job back in Brazil, I was part of a large cohort of interns who end up all being hired together. We were young and well-connected, and always on top of everything that was happening in the company, from official stuff to the proverbial grapevine telegraph. Rumour conversations used to start like this: “I’ve heard from 3 different sources that…” My pal Alexandre Guimaraes used to joke that none of us had 3 different sources as we all shared the same connections.

Likewise, I often hear from my Twitter fellows that their RSS feed reader is now abandoned, as most of the interesting online things they find now comes from their tweeps. A quick experiment seems to confirm that trend. Here are the results of a Twitter search for “twitter feed reader“:

Search results for "twitter feed reader"

In my recent re-read of The Wisdom of Crowds, the following excerpt called my attention (highlight is mine):

(…) the more influence a group’s members exert on each other, and the more personal contact they have with each other, the less likely it is that the group’s decisions will be wise ones. The more influence we exert on each other, the more likely it is that we will believe the same things and make the same mistakes. That means it’s possible that we could become individually smarter but collectively dumber.

The first time I read that was many years before Twitter even existed, so it didn’t mean much to me. Now I can relate: I do feel that Twitter is making me individually smarter, as I can quickly consume a whole lot of info from news sources, geeks, NBA players, celebrities, friends and others. I find the Twitscoop cloud in TweetDeck a particularly good way to find what’s going on around the globe right now.

Twitscoop cloud

I used to see that cloud as a visualization of our collective intelligence. But perhaps that cloud is actually something much more humbling: the visualization of our own echo chamber, our herd’s brain. By being so intensely connected, we may be losing one of the most basic conditions identified by Surowiecki’s for a crowd to be wise: independence (the other 2 are diversity and decentralization).

Should we all stop using Twitter and Facebook now? Of course not. But maybe we should invest a bit more of our time going after the unusual, the unpopular, the offline, the old and the out-of-fashion. The core is boring, and the fringe is where real innovation and change tend to appear first.

Our story thus far:

If I can summarize the arguments of the TwoPointOpians, the single most compelling case for folksonomies as a classification system is that the quantity and the diversity of information on the Internet defies traditional classification methods.

Tagging, the argument goes, taps into the wisdom of crowds. In the domain of computer science, the mantra of open source software is “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” (Eric S. Raymond in his essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar). The corresponding proposition for librarianship might be “given enough eyeballs, everything will eventually get classified, and classified correctly.”

But the case for social bookmarking is not just that it is a possible way of classifying content on the Internet, but that it is the only way. The reason? There is just too much material out there for traditional manual classification by professional cataloguers. A horde of taggers can combine human intelligence with the efficiency of web crawling spiders.

There is a second line of argument in favour of social bookmarking, and this is the essential argument that used when selling any Web 2.0 technology to librarians: it’s a way to connect with people who wouldn’t otherwise use the library’s services. It’s all about reaching out to that restless, internet-savvy generation eagerly pursued by advertisers and library consultants alike. For example, young adults won’t use your library web site but if the young adult blog or the young adult events page is tagged on del.icio.us, maybe they will find it and share it with their friends.

This also engages patrons in their own space. “If our web-savvy users notice [that the library] is using del.icio.us,” says Joanna Aegard, head of virtual library services at Thunder Bay PL, “our hope is that they will recognize our position in the community as information providers, visit our web site, work with our virtual collection, and become engaged library users.”

— Melissa L. Rethlefsen writing in the Library Journal on-line edition

With the ubiquitous use of web-based and wireless Social Networks, people are increasingly using the term “Collective Intelligence“. However, I do have serious doubts they really understand what they meant. Some call it the wisdom of crowds or collective wisdom, others smart mobs, while others wealth of knowledge, world brain and so on. Moreover, turning things worse, there are those also, which tend to see it, or confound it with crowd-sourcing as well as prediction markets. Even if there are some loosely conceptual bridges between all them, it will be probably useful to know that the term was instead been born over the Artificial Intelligence research area, while exploiting stigmergic phenomena (see also Swarm Intelligence) among ensembles of cooperative agents. So what follows is a recent definition provided by Univ. of Alberta, Canada. This entry was added last month (Nov. 2009) at the Dictionary of Cognitive Science (Michael R.W. Dawson, David A. Medler Eds.):

Collective intelligence – is a term that refers to the computational abilities of a group of agents. With collective intelligence, a group is capable of accomplishing a task, or of solving an information processing problem, that is beyond the capabilities of an individual agent.

Collective intelligence depends on more than mere numbers of agents.  For a collective to be considered intelligent, the whole must be greater than the sum of its parts.  This idea has been used to identify the presence of collective intelligence by relating the amount of work done by a collective to the number of agents in the collection (Beni & Wang, 1991). If there is a linear increase in amount of work done as a function of the number of agents, then collective intelligence is not evident. However, if there is a nonlinear increase (e.g., an exponential increase) in the amount of work done as a function of the number of agents, then Beni and Wang argue that this is evidence that the collective is intelligent.

Collective intelligence is of interest in cognitive science because many colonies of social insects appear to exhibit this kind of intelligence, and this has inspired researchers to explore “porting” such processing to robot collectives. As far as robots are concerned, collective intelligence is exciting because it offers the possiblity of developing systems that are scalable (they don’t get disrupted when more agents are added) and flexible (they don’t get disrupted when some agents are damaged or fail) (Sharkey, 2006).

References:

1. Beni, G., & Wang, J. (1991, April 9-11). Theoretical problems for the realization of distributed robotic systems. Paper presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Sacramento, CA.
2. Sharkey, A. J. C. (2006). Robots, insects and swarm intelligence. Artificial Intelligence Review, 26(4), 255-268.

Gilad at the gated entrance of our gorgeous short term rental

Last week I made a Facebook boo boo, or Faux Pas if you will, and I have been hearing about it from friends and family since then.  Don’t let it happen to you!  Here’s the story.

We were on “vacation,” having been forcefully sent out of our apartment so plumbers could fix septic issues (in the interim they ripped up our entire floor, changed all the piping, and got concrete dust on EVERYTHING).  In any case, we went to this fantastic restaurant in Beit Shemesh (I won’t name it here b/c I love that place and it is unfortunate what happened next).  Shana (my daughter)  is highly allergic to dairy.  The waitress, who only spoke Hebrew and thought Shana was adorable, asked if she could give her a piece of chocolate.  We explained in Hebrew, three times, that Shana can’t have ANY dairy b/c she is allergic.  The waitress assured us  that it was semi-sweet chocolate with no dairy.  Shana proceeded to eat the chocolate and seemed very happy (usually she reacts to dairy right away with hives and itching, but none of that happened here).

After a 20-minute drive back to our country cottage, Shana finished the chocolate.  When we got inside she was having trouble breathing.  She began to itch all over and started to swell up in the face with discoloration.  In a panic we all jumped back into the car and I drove like a true Israeli (crazy for those who have never driven here) back to Beit Shemesh to the medical clinic there.  Shana was experiencing toxic shock.  I held her down while she thrashed and screamed so they could stick an IV in her arm.  Then they rushed her to a big hospital in Jerusalem by ambulance.  My wife went with her and I took our 10-month old, Gilad back to the cottage to pack our things.  We were going back to Jerusalem to spend the night with Shana.

Side Bar: that same day my landlady called to inform us the plumbers would need an additional 10-days.  She set us up in a short term rental right down the street from our apartment (gorgeous place – see the photo) and gave us her best for Shana.  Thanks Rachel – you were awesome through this whole mess.  Back to the story …

Gilad and I packed in a frenzy (well, I packed; he fell asleep).  We then went home (to the gorgeous short term apartment), I gave him dinner, and put him to sleep.  Shana would need to stay the night in the hospital b/c on the way to the hospital, the ambulance driver miscalculated the conversion of her weight from pounds to kilos and gave her too much adrenaline and steroids.  At about 12am a friend came over to stay with Gilad, while I went to the hospital to relieve Esther (thanks Alf!).

Shana in hospital at 2am (yes that is a sticker on her forehead)

When I finally got Shana to bed (at 2:30am) for some unknown reason I decided to check Facebook on my iPhone.  We hadn’t had a phone in our cottage and been somewhat incommunicado with family and friends that week.  After reading and replying to a few wall posts by friends, I typed this status update: “Sitting beside Shana’s hospital bed at 2:45am thanking G-d she’ll be alright.  Finally got her to sleep an hour ago.”  This would have been a completely fine update had anyone, including our parents, known what was going on.  Not to mention the time difference in Jerusalem and NY put them at about 7:45pm, prime time for Facebook checking.

My cousin called my aunt asking what had happened to Shana.  My aunt called my mom.  My mom didn’t know, but my in laws had some idea b/c they had called Esther on her Jerusalem phone with a calling card earlier in the day, but hadn’t told my parents, and so on.  The faux pas post generated 16 comments and many phone calls from concerned friends asking what happened.  By the next day we started damage control by posting on Facebook what had happened.  Also we got on the phone to family to tell them too.  By Monday we were still getting calls, and my wife had to apologize many times for my lapse in judgment.  I eventually posted: “Sorry to cause such a stir with this post – guess that’s what 2:45 am in the hospital with only an Israeli iPhone will do to you. Thanks for all your warm wishes. She’s fine now and bein her beautiful self.”

This calls to attention some Facebook etiquette.  Don’t post alarming things without giving family and friends context first (duh!).  It also raises an interesting point about communication: with real-time network updates at our fingertips the reach and effect our posts can have is magnified, especially if your profiles have many connections on them.  While network posts can save time informing many people at once about news, in my case it wasted time as I had to speak to many different people personally to assure them everything was okay.  Even posting the network update that she was okay, people wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth.  I guess the same thing can be true of good news, a wedding, birthday, promotion, etc. that if you post on your network you’ll have a lot of people vying for your attention to congratulate you, but there was something that just stuck with this latest incident.  We all know that you should be careful what you post, but the hospital episode made this rule of network engagement so much clearer for me.

The internet significantly changes how information is produced and consumed.

Realtime media

Interesting post on TechCrunch on how the news media will change to to realtime tools like Twitter.  Twitter, now with 5 million users, appears to be able to beat traditional media in reporting breaking news by about 45 minutes based on recent events such as Tiger Woods’ crash. The claim is that the traditional media is more reliable in its reporting, but the article questions that, as realtime media can introduce healthy scepticism and has the advantage of what James Surowiecki terms the wisdom of crowds.

Media Polarization

The other important theme to monitor is media polarization, as this article shows, people tend to watch news that mirrors their political beliefs. Watching news that agrees with your political bias tends to reinforce that bias. For example if you’re a Republican/Democrat and you watch Fox News/CNN, then that tends to reinforce your bias.

The Implications

With more sources for consuming information, such as an estimated 200 million blogs and the traditional media diminishing in importance, the likelihood is that people will increasingly seek out fragmented media sources that reflect, and reinforce their views.

Al eerder schreef ik over personal finance management (PFM)-tools. Het gaat om online hulpmiddelen om je persoonlijke financiën in kaart te brengen, te budgetteren en het verkrijgen van advies om je financiële huishouding te verbeteren. De laatste jaren waren het vooral niet-financiële instellingen die met oplossingen kwamen op het vlak van personal Finance, zoals het Amerikaanse Mint en Wesabe en het Nederlandse Yunoo (voorheen Qash).

Volgens het Nationaal Instituut voor Budgetvoorlichting (Nibud) lopen zo’n 3,5 miljoen huishoudens het risico om financiële tegenvallers niet te kunnen opvangen. Het volledige onderzoeksrapport vind je hier. Ze constateren een aantal belangrijke zaken, die relevant zijn voor dit artikel: geen overzicht maakt financieel kwetsbaar en goed omgaan met geld maakt gelukkig. Of een aantal Nederlandse personal finance management-tools ons gelukkig maakt gaan we uitvinden. In dit artikel aandacht voor Yunoo, ABN AMRO’s Familiekompas en ING’s Tim.

Yunoo

In maart 2009 ging Yunoo ‘live’, na eerst een jaartje als Qash door het leven te zijn gegaan. Vroeger had je nog Davilex Bank Offline (nog steeds trouwens), maar sinds software as a service zijn intrede deed verschuift het beheren van je financiën zich naar het internet. Met Yunoo kun je rekeningmutaties importeren van nagenoeg alle Nederlandse banken. Inmiddels slaagt Yunoo erin circa 70% van alle geimporteerde transacties op een juiste wijze te categoriseren, zodat je meer inzicht krijgt in je inkomsten en uitgaven. De overige mutatie moeten handmatig aan een categorie toebedeeld worden. Dat is een hele prestatie als je bedenkt dat iedere bank weer een eigen manier van presenteren heeft.

Met Yunoo kun je ook je kennis en ervaring delen met andere gebruikers. Met meer dan 35.ooo gebruikers (!) creeert Yunoo een behoorlijk whisdom of crowds en is zij de grootste online PFM-tool van Nederland. Desgevraagd laat Yunoo weten de ambitie te hebben binnen 5 jaar de nr. 1 in Europa te worden op het vlak van social personal finance. Dit kunnen ze waarschijnlijk niet op eigen kracht, dus werd er naarstig gezocht naar (strategische) investeerders. Inmiddels heeft Yunoo een strategisch partner aangetrokken, die het platform en de onderneming naar een hoger niveau gaat tillen.

Over ongeveer twee weken lanceert Yunoo een mobiele versie van haar PFM-tool.

Familiekompas

ABN AMRO’s Familiekompas is meer dan een PFM-tool. Het Familiekompas maakt alle gezinszaken inzichtelijk op één internetsite. De door het Familiekompas geboden diensten moeten appelleren aan gezinnen in de spitsuurfase van hun leven. Het Familiekompas laat je eigen situatie vergelijken met andere op het vlak van financiën, maar ook lifestyle. Daarnaast brengt het Familiekompas je in contact met professionele leverancier met betrekking tot kinderopvang, voogdij of verhuizing. Als Familiekompas-lid kun je korting op allerlei diensten krijgen. Het Familiekompas heeft inmiddels ruim 5.000 geregistreerden. Dit zijn niet per definitie betalende leden.

De PFM-tool binnen het Familiekompas heet het Uitgavenkompas. Het overgrote deel van de geregistreerden maakt ook actief gebruik van het Uitgavenkompas, waarmee je bankafschriften van ABN AMRO, ING en Rabobank kunt importeren. Volgens het Familiekompas gaat het automatisch categoriseren van mutaties in 75% van de gevallen in één keer goed. De overige mutatie moeten handmatig aan een categorie toebedeeld worden. Het Uitgavenkompas maakt vergelijking met andere gebruikers mogelijk. Zo kun je bijvoorbeeld jouw uitgaven aan verzekeringen vergelijken met die van andere gebruikers in eenzelfde persoonlijke situatie (gezinssituatie, inkomen, e.d.). Op basis van de vergelijking krijg je inzicht in besparingsmogelijkheden.

Tim

In juni startte de ING een pilot voor de PFM-tool Tim, het slimste huishoudboekje van Nederland. De ING doet de pilot in samenwerking met CentiQ, Wijzer in geldzaken, een initiatief van de overheid en ruim 40 andere partijen. Centiq deed onlangs onderzoek naar de financiële huishouding van consumenten. De conclusie is dat een groot deel van de Nederlanders aangeeft dat zij gebruik zou maken van een digitaal huishoudboekje gekoppeld aan hun bankrekening om inzicht te krijgen in hoeveel zij aan verschillende uitgavenposten besteden.

De Tim-pilot liep in augustus af. De feedback wordt nu gebruikt voor de verdere ontwikkeling van Tim. Meer informatie over de pilot vind je hier. Tim verschilt van Yunoo en het Familiekompas. Je kunt namelijk alleen de rekeningmutaties van een ING-rekening importeren, wat mijnsinziens echt een gebrek is. Wil je inzicht hebben in al je financien, dan moet je gegevens van meerder banken kunnen importeren. Nederlanders hebben over het algemeen meerdere rekeningen bij meerdere banken, bijvoorbeeld bankrekening bij ABN AMRO en spaarrekening bij Moneyou. Yunoo biedt mijns inziens daarom op dit moment de beste oplossing.

Tot slot

Een belangrijk verschil tussen bovenstaande initiatieven is dat Yunoo los staat van een bank en het Familiekompas en Tim initiatieven van banken zijn. Onlangs kreeg ik van een vriend de vraag hoe betrouwbaar Yunoo is. Deze vraag impliceert dat vertrouwen voor consumenten heel belangrijk is. Vertrouwen ze meer op de veiligheid van een bank of op de veiligheid van een onafhankelijk initiatief? Het gaat immers toch om je financiele gegevens. Gelet op het succes van Yunoo lijkt vertrouwen geen grote drempel te zijn. Daarnaast doet Yunoo er alles aan om vertrouwen uit te stralen als het gaat om veiligheid.

Uit meerdere onderzoeken blijkt dat er meer behoefte is aan het managen van de persoonlijke financiele huishouding. Mochten er in Nederland meerdere financiele instellingen zich willen storten op de personal finance-markt, dan kunnen ze wellicht een beroep doen op het Amerikaanse Wesabe. Wesabe heeft Wesabe Springboard gelanceerd, de springplank voor financiele instellingen om snel en goedkoop PFM-tools toe te voegen aan hun eigen online omgeving. Ik kan niet beoordelen of Nederlandse banken ook gebruik kunnen maken van de oplossing. Maar mocht dit mogelijk zijn, dan hoef je in ieder geval de mutaties van je eigen bank, die Wesabe Springboard gebruikt, niet meer handmatig te importeren. Kijk daar word ik nou gelukkig van.

Dire emergency bulletin!  Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, voting for this week’s Reel 13 contest will close today, Tuesday the 24th, at 4 PM.  Last week, our films were competing against each other; this week, “Be Like a Duck” has been thrown into the breach against two other films by people we don’t even know, and the race has been extremely tight.  “Be Like a Duck” and “Replay” have been trading the lead back and forth for days; yesterday, “Replay” pulled ahead for a pretty daunting lead.  But it’s not over yet!  If you, our lovely blog audience, will take a moment to vote and send the link for voting out to just a few friends, we can still take the coveted Saturday night slot on New York’s hugely popular Channel Thirteen.

To vote, just go to reel13.org.  Do it for America!  Do it for freedom!  Do it for ducks everywhere!  Do it because you’re bored at work!

And God bless you, every one.

Posted beseechingly by Keith

“I think this participative technology, social software as people call it can transform individual lives, firms, government and it is not all about sort of broad capitalist attitudes. I think it can affect some of the things people really care such as health education education, welfare.”, JP Rangaswami.

Directed by Ivo Gormley, Us Now is a 60 min. documentary about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet. Question is:  In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power? New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government.

For the sake of this post, let us get all the jargon out of the way:

1. Crowdsourcing
2. Community-based thinking/”ideation” (ugh)
3. Groupthink

I think that’s most of them.

As communicators, we are facing a very interesting time in our career. Since 2002 (rise of the blogosphere)  the face of advertising, marketing and public relations has been slapped repeatedly with change, conflict, pushback and notably, with social and new media. With perfect competition in the industry (meaning that all or most audiences involved are privy to the same information) the only room we have between audiences is differentiation (economically speaking, of course).

But none of that is news to you seasoned professionals, so let me get to the point. Organizations now are opting in to more of a pull strategy, they put a few goods or services out there and let demand take its course. Not a bad thing.  What I am concerned about is the growing dependence on the opinions of crowds. Here are my three reasons.

1. Crowds Will Not ALWAYS Pick the Best Product for Them
Do not get me wrong, the individual is smart. The individual can decipher their own wants and needs and choose amongst a small selection what will work for them. But a crowd? Not so much. Crowds are the reason we get certain politicians in business. Crowds are the reason certain products are not and refused to be made. Crowds are the reason Kia is still in business. Crowds are the reason Tesla Motors haven’t taken off yet. It is human nature for people to swallow their own best interest and give in to a crowd’s command. Let us not forget that. If we want to be communicators, and in that business we vow to communicate what products will benefit them, then work on dividing the crowd, not uniting it.

2. The Product Chosen Might Not Be the Best Product for You
This is from a pure business standpoint. Internally, the product or service the crowd wants may have the potential to be significantly damaging to your fiscal structure. What do you do? If the crowd is in control of the message and information, then you are going to brace for disaster or find a way to be profitable. If you are in control of the message, you can change the conversation.

3. An Organization Should Never Lose Control of the Conversation
As a self-proclaimed gen Y’er, millennial, yadda yadda, I believe whole-heartedly in two-way communication. I do believe that we need to take a step back and better society and ourselves. And I also believe that we can do both at the same time.  So let’s take a step back from this situation. There will be times when an organization will lose control of a message. In this day and age it is inevitable. But the organization should never lose control of the conversation.

Like any argument, each party will make a solid point from time to time. But the party who wins the argument kept control.

Cheers,

DW

Throughout these few weeks, we were learning about how everyone is becoming relevant through Social Media. It’s kind of raised a few questions in my mind, but let me link all the topics together first…

We first learnt about Wisdom of Crowds, or how a average opinion would be more accurate than a single individual’s opinion. An interesting quiz was done to see, and the crowd won!  However, we were a pretty smart crowd So, I was wondering what would happen if the crowd wasn’t wise? I mean,(no offence anywhere, of course),  a group of people does not always = wise crowd.

I did a slight amount of research, and apparently there are 4 elements in order to make a wise crowd!Plus, not anything can work in this context as well Interesting, right? Just look at the link below:

http://hughgarry.typepad.com/hugh_garry/2009/03/sxsw-dumb-people-make-wise-crowds.html

So, the main gist would be: We can’t all know the same thing, we need to think independently, we cannot have a ‘leader’ and well, we need to know how to put all the opinions into a aggregate.

This process needed to get the aggregate makes sense if it comes to big events (like an election, though that always remains to be seen in these days), but for simple matters, it seemed quite long and complicated, so it wouldn’t have been something I would have done for everything.

I guess this is when people jump to forums in order to get this knowledge. For example, to me, a review is more credible if there are positive and negative ones. If it’s a pure positive review, then I’m worried that I’m being brainwashed. After all, how can everyone love the same shampoo or line of makeup?

This brings me to Citizen Journalism. It wasn’t really fully covered in class, but I’m sure everyone knows what it is, right? Even though everyone can be known in the Internet, it isn’t easy to get people to find you credible, thus the reason why even though there are over 112 million blogs, only a few are famous. This shows that even though everyone can have a voice, we will still have people that lead us and people we trust. The funny thing is, we don’t know most of them. Isn’t that weird? Haha the main thing is that we’re supposed to trust the people we know the most, yet alot of people can trust forums so easily. That’s another thing I’m still figuring out, I think.

However, if you realise, the more hits a person has on their blog/ Youtube page doesn’t mean much sometimes. I see alot of Youtube pages that have SO many hits, yet they’re not funny(as they claim), not informative, and sometimes not even real(ghost stories, anyone?). Wikipedia is another example. The more edits a page has had does not mean it’s more accurate, just that more people have their own opinion on the page and person/thing. Seriously, when someone can be ‘pronounced dead’ on Wiki and needs to appear on TV to prove otherwise, you know that accuracy is a problem. (And yet, we still all believe it. The irony )

Alot of times, it always depends on whether the people who use blogs and social media like Twitter and Facebook know how to use it in order to market themselves appropriately, like the guest speakers we had. I think that the 2 we had are very sincere people, but the thing with ‘popular’ people is that they always make me feel like they’re not very personal. The 2 we had were very nice and an example of how it is possible to be popular AND nice, but as we can see from the celebrities on Twitter, most of them don’t bother with ‘the little people’. (Well, unless they have a new album/movie coming out, then that’s different.)

I guess, in conclusion…I’m not sure. Everything keeps changing, and who knows? the accuracy problem might solve itself and then we can all be wise crowds!

That was my favourite quote from Polivka’s recent blog entry. Simple but true.

Call it what you will, crowdsourcing or the wisdom of crowds, it is here to stay and evolve. Information, knowledge and power lie not only in the Internet, but also in the people and the connections between people that network via the Internet.

As usual, the education world is among the last to acknowledge it. Never a day goes by when an RSS feed lets me know of some organisation or other using the 2.0 moniker. For example, the National Computing Centre in the UK has an article on how Web 2.0 has changed the face of education. It’s not a recent article, but it is practically a template for educational institutions who are trying to adapt to Web 2.0.

But I want to go beyond creating awareness. I am a matchmaker and I work towards educators embracing it!

The world will end on 21 December 2012, claims “web-bot” technology that has pushed apocalyptic prophecy into the internet age.

According to web’s conspiracy theorists, the bots accurately predicted the September 11 attacks and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and now they believe that a cataclysm of some sort will devastate the planet on 21 December, 2012.

Developed in the 1990s to predict stock market movements, the software is similar to the “spiders” that search engines use to index web pages.

The bots crawl through relevant web pages, noting keywords and examining the text around them. The theory is that this gives an insight into the “wisdom of crowds”, as the thoughts of thousands of people are aggregated, reports The Telegraph.

George Ure, the project’s “co-mind”, says that his system predicted a “world-changing event” in the 60 to 90 days after June 2001, and on 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks happened.

Despite the vagueness of this prediction, many believed it to be genuine.

Now, the latest prediction is that 21 December 2012 signals the end of the world, possibly through a “polar shift” – when the polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field is reversed. Believers claim that as well as the bots, the 2012 apocalypse is predicted by the ancient Mayan calendar, the Book of Revelations, and the Chinese text I Ching. (ANI)

I am working on a post regarding the fall of good wrting since the dawn of digtial media and web 2.0.  Right now, the post for my inspiration: Death of Writing on Loose Wire Blog, which I came across when I typed in Google: ‘death of writing.’  The post will be about how now that everything I type is digital, it seems (or is) weak in comparison to writing longhand or with typewriter.  I know typing on a typewriter is an anachronism, but I am having trouble reconciling what is better: the power of scarcity/permanance of errors in the typewriter world and the power of the many of the digital age of web 2.0.

Scarcity creates a level of urgency that when it hits, it soars. The particular challenge of typing words on a manual typewriter and their place on the physical page means that one poor choice effects the rest of the page.  This creates a strong filter for mediocre work (both leaving the X’d in mark of the mistake or even whiteout don’t erase the mistakes only covers them like mistakes in our own lives).   Our mistakes offline usually leave a permanent mark somewhere, even when well-hidden, and while holding on to them is not good, forgeting and/or never learning from them is how we evolve.  In the world of crowdsourcing, your mistakes are often pointed out by someone else, but often become little digital cautionary tales for others, leading to potentially a strong work in aggregate. My question is, does it make the individual writer better when the pressure is off on making mistakes.   If anyone comes across anything along these lines, let me know.  Thanks.  I hope to pull something together in the next few days.

AND

I don’t know if I am following protocol here but I wanted to post on some other classmates blog post from each week’s assignments (this week crowdsourcing)  to make my list of what I am looking for in a blog and what makes me want to linger on a site (visual, content)? I am trying to practice the below approach but don’t always hit the mark.

1. Lead with clever or new: I have a short attention span and get bored easily. This week’s posts by Angie and Antonella’s brought something to the table that I hadn’t thought about: Angie’s recent post on Girliegirl1965 brought the new technology (crowdsourcing) to the traditional activity of practicing faith.  I don’t know if it was her intent but it got me thinking about how the church has long been a place of belief, relationships and sometimes gossip, and how crowdsourcing is very similar. Antonella fed my quiet distrust of homogeny with In Wikipedia we trust. Should we? My biggest beaf (and likely misstep) with the rise of social media is that the demographics of the techonocratic class skews largely white and male (or at least it feels that way).  This doesn’t necessarily mean that wikipedia and the like are biased.  But I think race or identifying with a particular race does determine context and perspective.  I don’t think it can be avoided but I also don’t think it should be taken for granted.

What I learned from Angie and Antonella: DON’T BURY THE LEAD.  One of the ways good blogs are like good writing is that though writing blogs is often more free form,  the best part of the blog can often come at the end of the post.  If it takes reworking the beginning and putting the juiciest links (with the cleverest anchor text) at the top, do it.

]]> http://mediaindigest.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/response8-crowdsourcing-vs-groupthink-or-looking-for-20-or-why-halfbackery-com-gets-it-right/ Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:31:12 +0000 nishsuvarnakar http://mediaindigest.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/response8-crowdsourcing-vs-groupthink-or-looking-for-20-or-why-halfbackery-com-gets-it-right/

My questions for evaluating crowdsourcing sites:

1. Does it follow Clay Shirky’s Principle of Promise, Tool, Bargain?

2. Who can actually join this ‘crowd’ or How easy is it to join the crowd?

3. Would I want to join this ‘crowd’?

4. Can I be myself and still be a part of the crowd (avoid groupthink)?

Josh Catone has even come up with rules (bottom of post) for successful crowdsourcing  on a ReadWriteWeb post from 2007 that were helpful but for me the key is whether a particular activity meets my personal sustained engagement threshold (me be the baromater for what any yahoo would do).  I poked around the crowdsourcing directory and a few other listings for different types of crowdsourcing sites (both ones clearly with marketing in mind or others that were meant for amusement-hat tip to classmate).  I admit the ones that are still going strong are genuinely neat.  Some were a little creepy like Perverted-Justice, some seem uncomfortably corporate like YourEncore and some were silly like Halfbackery.  What I couldn’t find was a crowd that is something more than momentarily interesting.  I look at something like Threadless and I am certainly impressed with the collective intelligence and it follows Catone’s rules.  I can’t confirm that Threadless follows the 80/20 rule, but I think I’m definitely in the 80.  Where I think sites fall a little short is when the psychological lift of viewing let alone engaging is higher than any red-blooded lurker is willing to go.  Threadless averages 5.6 pageviews a visitor based on Alexa.

If I had to pick one site that I keep coming back to it’s Halfbackery. I enjoy the mix of funny posts like the tumbleweed dispensor and creative like the phobia alarm clock and appreciate that its intent isn’t to be a repository for the next big idea like Cambrian House or bzzagent, but really just a place to share weird ideas.

From What the halfbakery isn’t

The site is also not a resource to help people guide their inventions from conception to completion. This is the place where you post the things you’re not going to be working on – because you can’t be bothered, or you don’t know how to, or because it’s not such a stellar idea after all.

The site is also not a marketplace where owners of patents find interested developers. Such sites exist (some are listed under links), but this isn’t one of them.

And finally, sending me email isn’t a good way of contacting the Dunkin’ Donuts corporation (but clicking on the preceding link is).

Any site that keeps my short-attention span for more than two pages, is about half-way to being a success in my book.  Halfbakery is simple enough a concept and its interface is ridiculously self-explanatory. The titles of the intentions draw you in for at least 3-5 inventions and the comments can be informative and are generally funny but the format is such that people don’t fall into the Borg mentality and stupid or brilliant (favoring stupid) your idea is given a fair shake from the group.   This is a fun group of 20% and I am about 50% sure that if I come up with something off-the wall crazy, I would post it on this site.

Links that I found interesting that I couldn’t fit into this post:

Dumbness of Crowds by Kathy Sierra

Top 100 Digg users control 56% of homepage content -80/20 Rule

Digital Maoism-Jaron Lanier

I have never heard of this term before…except for, perhaps, the Chinese version of it, which is 三个臭皮匠， 胜过一个诸葛亮。After being taught this term “Wisdom of Crowds”, I realised that, I have always been a believer of it, as long as many people come together as a huge group, the group will definitely outsmart the smartest person you ever know.

To put it simpler, if you recall form your Biology lessons, more brains=more grooves=smarter. Isn’t it so? Without the example of Wikipedia, I will never know that wisdom of crowds is actually used online too. That’s right! Wikipedia, when everyone is doubting the credibility of it, there is something called the “Wisdom of Crowds” which actually saved this awesome encyclopedia some face. Not that I am a harcdcore Wikipedia fan, but I seriously think that Wikipedia has given us more information in life and perhaps, improve our general knowledge to a certain extent. Before I start writing this post, I even googled Wisdom of Crowds, and what do I get? Wikipedia again.

Wisdom of crowds is indeed awesome. It answers to so many of our questions with contributions from people all over the world, logging into wikipedia and making any page better for readers who are searching for that article.

Wikipedia is good because of Wisdom of Crowds and also bad because of Wisdom of Crowds. Good because knowledge is being shared and improved, bad because the information edited into the article is not justified and it is just from the person’s knowledge, this means that it may be right or wrong.

Just when I thought it is a tie, I saw THIS ARTICLE.

One paragraph like this is good enough to make me re-think the credibility of Wikipedia:

Of course, we now know that simply isn’t true. For one thing, Wikipedia isn’t written and edited by the “crowd” at all. In fact, 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site’s edits. Even Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, has been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, “a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers.”

In conclusion, I still think that more brains means more wisdom, which is the blunt way of explaining what is Wisdom of Crowds. However, when this is being brought on Wikipedia, we need to re-think the credibility if we are going to use the information for a live-or-die situation, that is, if you are going to use the information on Wikipedia for something super important, don’t. If you just need it to clear your momentary doubts, why not? It informs more than it harms anyway.