I’m looking for the wisdom of MY crowd.
A thought that occurred to me commenting on a Robert Scoble post.
- I use Google Reader because I’ve selected the inputs.
- I get news from the people I’ve selected on Twitter and Friendfeed
- I get personal news from the people I’ve selected on Facebook.
- I don’t use Digg etc as much as I might because it’s the wisdom of a random crowd I haven’t selected.
great post on wisdom of MY crowd. i commented there. you too? http://tinyurl.com/6auvlp
I like this thought, but it depends on what sort of info I’m looking for. I agree that I have my chosen and filtered crowd that I listen to already. However, for things that are outside the wisdom of ‘my crowd’ I like to go elsewhere – like wikipedia for example. My crowd doesn’t know what ‘they’ know. I turn to my crowd for what I know they are experts on.
Interesting and I tend to agree with you especially with the info overload of those days. Crowds tend to be just huge echo chambers and you don’t get much out of it that you don’t already know (besides the case described by the previous commenter). Transposing what you said to the enterprise, I see the need for the same wisdom (though there may be as many ‘my crowds’ as they’re individual groups in a given enterprise) So then, why are ‘social media monitoring’ tools so much in favor nowadays? All they give is the wisdow of crowds…
Cheers for the interesting comments.
@Rob – I definitely agree that resources like Wikipedia etc, and those topics outside my network definitely provide a resource, although do find my first instinct is to ask my network via Twitter etc, and then use Wikipedia.
@laurent – I think many people have encountered the echo chamber since the earliest newsgroups and forums! Social Media Monitoring/Buzz Monitoring tools are slightly different, as they aggregate individual posts, comments and thoughts etc. And generally they provide a more quantitative result, with the facility to more easily see the vocal qualitative results, rather than aggregating the thoughts of people around the blogosphere, for example, into a most popular improvement to your website, for example.
There’s definitely a role for crowdsourcing, but it’s choosing the most appropriate tool for the task, rather than assuming that plugging in a random crowd will solve everything!