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The Wisdom of (Stupid) Crowds

Scott Karp argues that Audiences Are Not Created Equal. He’s sort of right. A while back, when Digg users voted a woefully incorrect story to the front page, we had a long and detailed discussion on Mashable about whether the wisdom of crowds works - essentially, whether many ignorant users are better than a few experts. The gist of my argument was that Digg didn’t count as a wisdom of crowds system, since its users don’t act independently (the ability to see how others have voted leads to groupthink). I also maintained that in real wisdom of crowds systems (like stock markets), the crowd is indeed much more intelligent than the educated individual. However, others pointed out in the comments that choosing a news story is not like estimating a stock price - it is a matter of opinion, not fact. I think this is correct.

Like Scott, I find Digg useless. But that’s because it’s populist - like a tabloid newspaper, it seems to converge on the lowest common denominator. Digg users choose the “right” stories for other Digg users, but these might not be so interesting to the Memeorandum set. In fact, most of what turns up on Memeorandum is completely useless to me. Contrary to Scott’s argument, this is not because one audience is smarter than another, but because different tribes have different priorities. The answer is not to reintroduce old media hierarchies. Instead, we allow people to become their own editors through personalization. I should have my own personalized Digg or Memeorandum which reorders the news based on my preferences. This could take into account my preferred authors (editors?), my implicit attention data and the opinions of my “tribe” (and bear in mind that most of us belong to multiple affinity groups). So while old media types will indeed become consistent and popular editors that appeal to many different tribes (or have strong appeal to one tribe in particular), the ultimate editor in the new media landscape is the reader herself.

And yes, Umair Haque is always right.


    Posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 7:47 pm. Trackback from your own site.

Comments»

1. Publishing 2.0 » Audiences Are NOT Created Equal - February 25, 2006

[…] Pete Cashmore’s response got me thinking: Like Scott, I find Digg useless. But that’s because it’s populist - like a tabloid newspaper, it seems to converge on the lowest common denominator. Digg users choose the “right” stories for other Digg users, but these might not be so interesting to the Memeorandum set. In fact, most of what turns up on Memeorandum is completely useless to me. Contrary to Scott’s argument, this is not because one audience is smarter than another, but because different tribes have different priorities. The answer is not to reintroduce old media hierarchies. Instead, we allow people to become their own editors through personalization. […]

2. Nir Ben-Dor - February 26, 2006

The solution to the problem of scattered massive amount of small sources of information will come, like in most industries and human trends, from consolidation. Not that of the users (like what we can see at Digg and Reddit) but of the content creators.

Good bloggers, writing on similar subjects will realise the benefit of synergy. An online magazine for example, written by 5 good bloggers will have much larger audience and be much more attractive than the sum of the 5 individual blogs.
The reasons are
1) that it will be more of a one stop shop helping readers solve their need efficiently reading.
2) Search engines will bring in much more traffic than the sum of the 5 blogs
3) The bloggers will be able to focus on interesting topics rather than repeating other blogger’s topics. (one blogger will have to focus on Google for the other 4 will be able to write about other things)

Nir Ben-Dor, Linkadelic Magazine
www.comagz.com/webmagazine/

3. Mashable.com/journal » Stupid Mobs Can Still Make Smart Decisions - February 26, 2006

[…] Mashable.com « The Wisdom of (Stupid) Crowds […]

4. mathewingram.com/work - February 26, 2006

Some Scott Karps are better than others

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 is getting on my nerves again. Scott, who works at the company that publishes The Atlantic Monthly, removed that fact from his “About Me” page because he didn’t want all that “old media” bagga…

5. Mashable* » CoMagz - February 26, 2006

[…] CoMagz is a citizen journalism/News 2.0 play that seems to have appeared on my radar a few times, so I thought I’d take some time to explain why this kind of model might not be optimal. But first, the blurb: CoMagz is a citizen media website which provides communities and groups their own online magazines—the CoMagz “CoMagazines”. The content of a CoMagazine is created by users and rated by users. Any user can submit hot news, articles, and recommended links—or even write a column. CoMagz wants to be your favorite place on the web for reading and writing about items that interest you…CoMagz is also a community of people with shared interests. All users who choose to register with CoMagz are automatically given their own page in which they can put information about themselves. Readers of a CoMagazine can contact each other, discuss ideas, exchange information, and more. […]

6. Some Scott Karps are better than others » mathewingram.com/work - April 27, 2006

[…] with del.icio.us   |   Email this entry   |   TrackBack URI   |   Digg it   |   Track with co.mments   |  […]


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