On Browse

by Joshua Porter  |   April 21st, 2006  |  shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/402

Derek Powazek in The Wisdom of Browse:

“As the web matures, and we get better at developing member-driven media sites like Digg, we have to look beyond simplistic majority-rule popularity contests if we ever want to take on traditional editor-driven media. People are complicated, and we’re going to need complicated systems to really draw the wisdom out of the crowd.”

This follows hot on the heels of my recent post The One Crucial Idea of Web 2.0 as well as Ajit’s insight into collective intelligence, where he recast Web 2.0 principles underneath the umbrella of the Wisdom of Crowds. (collective intelligence) Alex has a nice writeup on this, too.

I’m confident that we’re seeing another insight from networked life here. The insight is that we can aggregate the wisdom of crowds, but only under certain circumstances and perhaps only for so long without evolving our systems. The recent Digg.com blowup is evidence that our systems need to adapt as their users adapt.

For those not familiar with the Wisdom of Crowds…

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1.  Tim 8:32am, Fri 21st, 2006

Also, perhaps, of general interest is James Surowiecki’s SXSW 2006 presentation, “The Wisdom of Crowds” –
http://server1.sxsw.com/2006/coverage/SXSW06.INT.20060311.WisdomOfCrowds.mp3

…a great listen.

2.  Pete Cashmore 1:22pm, Fri 21st, 2006

Interesting stuff. The thing we’ve got to remember about the Wisdom of Crowds is that decisions must be independent – Digg is emphatically not a Wisdom of Crowds system because users can see how others have voted. A single incorrect piece of info then leads to an info cascade, with everyone just copying those that went before them. I caught a site called SocialPicks yesterday that’s doing a similar thing with stocks.

3.  Josh 3:57pm, Fri 21st, 2006

Pete, I was just writing up that same point…some are saying that this means the end of “wisdom of crowds”, but according to the theory it is not.

When I read Surowieki’s book I was surprised at how strict the rules of a aggregable crowd are. Not all systems apply. I think that much effort has been put into the aggregation part, but not necessarily the independence part. (decentralization is usually built in)

Thanks for pointing that out…

4.  David Swedlow 6:51pm, Sun 23rd, 2006

While we’re mentioning criteria, don’t forget “diversity.”

So far, the web2.0 tools attract a fairly narrow and uniform band of the collective. Almost all of the aggregators harvest the madness of crowds rather than the wisdom. In fact, I believe this is a primary reason that a lot of people refute the validity of Surowiecki’s claims.

The Opposable Mind idea emphasizes this point; just like the value of the thumb is the opposablity factor, harnessing the opposability of minds is a goal we should be giving more attention.

5.  Daniel Szuc 1:09am, Sun 7th, 2006

Hi Josh: passed this onto Jared and amazing stuff.

Jo Wong (http://www.apogeehk.com/jo.html) passed me an article from the ‘Asian Wall Street Journal’ on a site in China that allows people to come together when they want to negotiate a deal on the same product they are interested in buying e.g “the team purchase”.

May generate some interesting discussion on Brainsparks – http://www.51tuangou.com (available in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Suzhou). Don’t think there is an English site.

Are there similar services in the US?