Wisdom of the Crowds

January 31st, 2008 Richard

Our theme for this week is virtual communities/crowds/mobs. As far as the crowds, I saw an excellent talk at the 2006 SXSW interactive conference given by James Surowiecki. This whole 1 hour talk is on line on the sxsw site. The talk is loaded with many examples that support his ideas, and theories/research from a number of sources. If we accept these things, the most important question becomes: what factors are important in determining when “crowd wisdom” will be more accurate than expert wisdom, so I made a seven minute clip, from different places in his talk, that focus on these important factors: objective aggregation (my term), diversity, independence.

Posted in web and new media, wisdom_of_crowds | 11 Comments »