The idea that collective intelligence is greater than that of the individual (expert) made for a great book. When applied to the web, however, it seems the wisdom of crowds is being disproved.
Rather than identifying relevant, interesting content, community-based ranking sites like digg seem to be aggregating stories that either appeal to the least common denominator (”iPhone Unveiled”) or relate only to the respective community (”Duplicate Comments on Digg.”)
So, if you aren’t interested in the top 10 things to love about the iPhone, where do you turn to find relevant content?
Discovering relevant articles.
Techmeme and BuzzFeed are two separate implementations of an idea I rank higher than digg democracy in regard to surfacing relevant articles. Popular stories are ranked based on incoming links and other outside factors but are not voted on by mass committee. I find the number of inbound links from bloggers to be far more telling of a story’s relevance than the number of votes from the digg trolls / editors / community members.
Discovering relevant [blog] feeds.
Dave Winer scratches the surface of what could be done with opml reading lists. Mining for popular blog feeds is made easy when throngs of blog consumers are willing to volunteer what they’re reading. And to me, finding relevant feeds is more important than finding interesting posts. With new blogs popping up by the minute, discovering the relevant ones is becoming increasingly difficult. One issue with the shareyouropml is that it’s not based on dynamic reading lists, but that’s a longer conversation.
Discovering community content.
I recently discovered that charisma:18 was included in a Twin Cities technology blog deck. Most of these blogs are made even more relevant to me in that I’ve met a few of the authors. I subscribe to very few of these blogs, but I check in every other day or so. I’d love to find similar decks including microformats fanatics, rss fanatics, performance marketing fanatics… you get the idea. To me, community is rarely a condition of geographic location (rarely, not never.)
Blog networks and workgroups have a lot to offer in this category as well. 9rules and others will need to avoid adding too many authors to remain relevant though. Too many authors means sprawl. Sprawl means surfing. Surfing takes too much time.
Discovering news.
News aggregation is tough. Objective reporting is so heavily influenced by politics that I have a hard time finding a single source for relevant news. I need a news reader / aggregator to allow me to mark articles as too far right or too far left. And I need to be able to filter.
True wisdom of crowds.
There’s a huge potential in this space to develop a tool that allows consumers to tap into the true collective wisdom rather than the least common denominator of the mobs to discover relevant content. The answer to the question (how do I plug in to a relevant content source?) will come from a hybrid of some the existing ideas I mentioned above coupled with some new ones.
2 Responses to “The wisdom of crowds is lacking”
Aaron - Digg is a poor example of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ phenomenon - because of it’s transparency. To harness WoC, there’s a required independence among the actors and an inability to communicate between one another.
Google is a closer example. Though not perfect as I mention in my post on the subject.
I almost included the sharing option in google reader - I followed Scoble’s shared items for a while and could see an aggregation being valuable. I still think it’s too easy to share or vote up an article’s relevance though. Google search is certainly more relevant - if only it would add age of content into the equation. I like the idea of blending search relevance and ‘blogosphere’ relevance and bookmarking relevance and a few other ‘relevances’ together with personal preferences - the stuff that would pour out would taste a lot better.