The Wisdom of Crowds and Web2.0: Popularity v.s. Diversity
I am listening to James Surowiecki’s talk on the Wisdom of Crowds (mp3) at the SXSW Conference 2006.
Today I found two old articles about wisdom of crowds and Web2.0
1. The One Crucial Idea of Web 2.0
Written by Joshua Porter on March 17th, 2006
If there is one idea that encapsulates what Web 2.0 is about, one idea that wasn’t a factor before but is a factor now, it’s the idea of leveraging the network to uncover the Wisdom of Crowds. Forget Ajax, APIs, and other technologies for a second. The big challenge is aggregating whatever tidbits of digitally-recorded behavior we can find, making some sense of it algorithmically, and then uncovering the wisdom of crowds through a clear and easy interface to it.
Source: http://bokardo.com/archives/the-one-crucial-idea-of-web-20/
2、Answering to: The One Crucial Idea of Web 2.0
Written by Frederick Giasson on March 18th, 2006
It is all about popularity; it is all about Google Pagerank. But it is one tool amongst many others.
The problem I see with this method is that something has to be flagged by many, many people to pop-up to the surface - *something* has to be useful to many people that will dig it, link to it, etc. And personally I find useful information all day long, but I don’t or won’t link to that useful information.
I do not want to have the references to resources that meets the needs of *everybody on the Web*; I want to have the references to resources that fill MY needs.
The only time that such methods are really useful is when my needs meet those of the majority. That is often the case when we talk about general information. However it just doesn’t work when I start to search for up-to-date and specific information about an obscure subject, a subject that few people care about, or even more important, a subject about which information has to be inferred in order to be discovered!
Source:http://fgiasson.com/blog/index.php/2006/03/18/answering_to_the_one_crucial_idea_of_web_0/
After read two articles, I believe they talked on different things. Frederick said below:
It is all about popularity; it is all about Google Pagerank. But it is one tool amongst many others.
But I believe Joshua didn’t said on popularity. Wisdom of Crowds is not all about Google Pagerank.
Frederick also asked two questions about Google’s Achilles’ heel
Google offers good services. Google changed the landscape in the search industry. The problem is that I can always spend 1 hour finding something on the Web, and yet what I find is often basically unacceptable.
I have some questions for people who think that the current emerging “Web 2.0″ is a major breakthrough for the Web:
1- What happens if the “crowd” does not find the golden piece of information I am searching for because it is buried too deeply in the Web and nobody noticed it before?
2- Did anyone see an article written on the Canadian government that offers tricks to complete your income taxes form popping-up on Digg?
I believe Google Search has been out of the world of Web2.0, but Google also done something to improve their search products by Wisdom of Crowds.There are two examples below:
1、Google Image Labeler
Welcome to Google Image Labeler, a feature of Google Search that allows you to label images and help improve the quality of Google’s image search results.
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
2、Google Maps
Google Maps is a cool service let user add personal information and public information on the map. User’s notes should be within the search results for next user.
http://maps.google.com
Joshua said:
The big challenge is aggregating whatever tidbits of digitally-recorded behavior we can find, making some sense of it algorithmically, and then uncovering the wisdom of crowds through a clear and easy interface to it.
Yes, it is keystone to make a clear and easy interface to push the wisdom of crowds. The right way is not popularity,not digg,not Centralization. It is all about long tail and Diversity.