I was reading Tom Cole's blog entry and it got me to thinking about the trend towards sites that use the "Wisdom of Crowds" to power their sites.
The best example of this phenomenon is Wikipedia. 1.6 million entries that are amazingly up-to-date, accurate and detailed.
A famous research project surveys a large group of random individuals to guess how many marbles are in a jar. Time and again if you run this experiment with enough participants and average the results, the actual and average are strikingly close.
Some of the more interesting sites using the "wisdom of crowds" are:
digg: user-based ranking of news/publications to represent what is truely the most interesting stories of the day/moment.
StumbleUpon: user-based ranking to help you discover new web-sites that match your interests.
Yelp: real reviews, real people. Want to see what the general public thinks about the new Mediterranean restaurant around the block? Chances are someone has yelped it.
American Idol: not a web-site, but a cultural phenomenom that needs to be considered. How many tens of millions of albums has Kelly Clarkson sold?
So is there any negative impact of the influence and availablity of what the crowds are recommending? Will we all end up eating at the same restaurants, listening to the same music, reading the same newsfeeds, and buying the same camcorders? Not likely. Just as we are seeing social networks created for groups like left-handed Iowa farm workers, we will see digg babbies popping up everywhere too. Although there may be "wisdom in crowds", there will always be those needing to rage against the machine.
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