We're all nerds here, and this seems to be a real problem. What can we do about it? Can a Firefox plugin be made to weed out flagged squatted domains? Have you physically complained to Google either through email, written letter, or even in a blog posting/article? Or on the other end, perhaps we could evelop a software suite for parked domains that provides relevant information. Parked domains are annoying, but they'd be less annoying if they were still relevant.
It'd be kind of neat if accidentally typoing britenyspears.com brought up feeds with news on Britney Spears along with ads and other monetization schemes rather than just some boring Ad Directory that most are currently like. Anyway, my point is: If you hate this so much, why aren't you doing something about it? What can we do to stop it, or help to solve it? I don't imagine we can completely rule it out but there's bound to be plenty of ways we can weaken its hold. The world can't change unless you try to change it.
Do you honestly find domain parking to be evil? It may not be classy and domain squatters tend to piss me off but I still wouldn't classify it as evil. The problem isn't so much the squatters as the idiots that actually click ads through squatted domains and the registrars that allow "tasting" to begin with. Google isn't the only player in the industry as far as Domain Squatting goes and thus them not being in the market doesn't really stop it, it just limits the amount of competition.
If you care so mch about domain squatting then come up with ideas to deal with it. Perhaps a Firefox plugin that auto-removes flagged squatted domains from search listings or an article with practical tips on how to combat domain squatting and what Google and other content monetizers can do to curb squatting, increase useful content, and increase their bottom line. These people aren't evil and they also don't share your utopian ideals about the way things "should be". What they do listen to though is money and tips on how to gain money. I've found the best way to push Open Source, Open Content and other methodologies is to show businesses how being nice and open benefits them.
The McDonalds Coffee incident != Frivilous. Quit eating the dogfood and research the actual facts. The coffee was knowingly and neglectfully above safe levels for hours.
I will grant that we are a sue happy society, but there's a reason for that. Being an American who's lived in Canada for a couple years I'm noticing there's a lot more government support and government agencies here. The government regulates the corporations so the average Canadian doesn't even need to think of suing. In the US on the other hand, the government tends to be a bit more laissez-faire except when they want to increase barriers of entry for their friends in the industry, and as such the people are the ones that regulate the industry.
Lawsuits are a form of regulation. Lawyers suing companies for being dickheads is actually noble behavior. I think too many people buy into the "sue-happy" stereotype without considering why it exists. Given the power of lobbying, lawsuits are the only thing that really keeps industry in check by the people.
I've known for quite a while that piracy would be a great marketing tool. I actually wrote about the Creative Commons being a marketing tool on the popular writing e-zine "Writing World": Increase Your Market with a Creative Commons License
Interesting fact with that article, shortly after writing it Moira Allen decided to post all of her hundreds of articles under the Creative Commons as well. The real revolutionary thing about the Creative Commons and piracy is the viral marketing side of it. Companies have known for a long time that giving away free samples is awesome marketing, they just tend to cost considerably but with digital media this can be negated to almost nothing.
Sure some people don't buy your stuff, but in a lot of cases they wouldn't buy it anyway. You can also make up for a lower quality product by pirating it. For one thing it's off limits, for another it's free, and lastly it's obviously liked by other people otherwise it wouldn't be pirated. All these factors combine to make piracy and Open Licenses very powerful marketing tools that most companies are just missing out on.
I've actually covered the benefits of Philanthropic Marketing on my blog. This includes Open Source, Open Licensing, and just plain helping out in the community to foster a stronger community and help it thrive. A lot of the FOSS crowd seems to be a bit socialistic in their viewpoints and try to convert people that way. I prefer to cater to their greed and self-interest which we all have and which FOSS and sharing in general are compatible with.
If anyone's interested in learning more or getting help with a philanthropic marketing campaign drop me a line at the email address mentioned on my blog.
Wow. That was incredibly insightful. I wish I had modpoints. At first I was kind of confused myself but now I really can see the potential of this. It's not exactly useful for anything that has to remain secret but there's still a wide range of applications if it's applied properly. Thanks for the explanation.
Not only are most of Firefox's "unique" features copied from Opera, but Opera is also a remarkably fast and lightweight browser with most stuff built right in. It also happens to work in most variations of Linux including Sugar and it's used on the Nintendo Wii. Not to sound like a fanboy, but it's a far superior browser to anything else I've found.
Other than the source, I'm not sure I see the big deal with Firefox. It's bloated and feature light to start with and as you add on more plugins the bloat just gets bigger. Is seeing the source really worth using an inferior product?
A nice, well reasoned response. Thanks. I must apologize though as I don't have the time to research and respond to most of your points but I think you're a bit more right in this case than I am. My main problem with unions is the "Seniority Syndrome" of whoever's been there the longest is considered the best and treated the best regardless of actual skill or merit. This is not an ideal system and if it doesn't punish talented individuals it at the very least demotivates them.
I used to be pretty heavily anti-union but I think the parent post is a concise and interesting viewpoint on unions and their purpose in the past. However, I also think the Internet sort of obsolesces them to some extent. It used to be if you had a problem with your company without a union it was just you versus your boss. You could tell a few friends and they might consider what you've said the next time they try to interact with the company but your web of affect was far lower.
Fast forward to today and if your company screws you over you can blog about it, you can post it to the Consumerist. If they screwed you over for whistle blowing post stuff to Wikitruth or send notes to several prominent bloggers telling your story. Make relevant comments on forums/blogs discussing such problems as yours fell under. Pretty soon your company has been shown in a negative light to millions of people. You've got a lot more power on your side.
I don't think unions as a concept are completely irrelevant but I think they've lost the absolute place they needed before. Something as simple as creating a forum for workers within your industry that they can talk on can go a long way. Someone acts like a dick? Bloggers just blacklist them based on a few forum posts. Authoritative statements made in the forum or on a blog can go a long way towards changing things without needing to force everyone to stop working or pay dues or any such other crap.
I believe the powerline internet you're talking about is called Broadband over Power Lines or BPL. As I recall there was a lot of opposition to BPL because it interferes with the HAM radio spectrum. Hopefully someone more knowledgable can chime in on the discussion soon.
McDonalds, Walmart, Target, Lowes, The Bush Regime, Kane & Lynch, Eidos, Sony, etc.
Honestly, this unionizing idea is just plain stupid. How can you unionize a very loosely connected group of people? Most of these people barely even know eachother, much less interact. What is the benefit of unionizing beyond being able to use the union for pressure which can not currently be applied?
They could always go with a Blogging Guild similar to the Writer's Guild, another group of self-important windbags, but the point of this all is kind of moot. Blogging is about freedom. Post whatever the hell you want. If people like it they'll buy your products, click your ads, make comments or whatever else. You can't really expect readers to stick around purely on account of your seniority.
You have a good point in that searching through books can help you to learn all sorts of new and slightly related things on the way to your endpoint. However, society is progressing to the point where precise targetting is far preferred to generalization. We've got entire fields that require 4+ years of intense focus on just one or two small spheres of knowledge.
If you're looking to learn all encompassingly about a subject then a book is a great way to do so. However if instead you're looking to research just one particular topic within a subject or get a refresher a book is rather inefficient. Targetting allows very quick knowledge acquisition which allows us to become more efficient to focus on other tasks. Researching being faster just means you can get more work done, in essence.
For some reason I thought Pot was outlawed to target the blacks and eradicate hemp's thread to the nylon industry. Do you have any data on it being used to target Mexicans?
That was just a pisspoor example. A better attempt at the bridge sale would be to imply that I am unintelligent or unmanly after previously having implied buying a bridge to be intelligent/manly. The same method can work with "giving away value at a discount price", it just requires a creative application.
Actually, tossing an insult at someone is a *very* effective strategy for convincing them to take a particular action. There's fewer response choices available for insults, and the pride of most people reduces their effectiveness at just ignoring insults altogether. Intelligent social engineers make use of insults just as much if not more than compliments due to the fact that compliments can be looked upon with suspicion and a reverse course of action applied. People rarely consider that they may be being insulted to cause a specific course of action.
It's not really an issue of lethal rounds or nothing, it's the lower barrier of entry and lower accountability of using a taser. Would this Polish guy at Vancouver airport have been shot in the heart? Unlikely. Would he even have been clubbed? Again, unlikely. Tasers seem to take on this extra appeal. There's no accountability to using them. You don't feel the force of your impact, you're detached from the fact that your volts very well could be killing this person. In essence, you've got no negative feedback for tasering them, and thus a taser becomes an acceptable weapon at a time when weapons are not needed.
Pepper Spray, clubs, Handguns, and even hand to hand all have different negative feedbacks which inhibit their abuse, at least a little bit. A taser has none. Look at the guy that tasered a handcuffed 17 year old girl. They dropped the case, citing there wasn't enough evidence. The police force's current taser policy is clearly pretty unacceptable.
A journalist using a misleading headline? Who would have thought! The nerve of some people, I mean really. You'd think they were just trying to inflate their page views and not even bother to report real news. On that note, one of the most funny bad headlines I've seen was "J.K. Rowling turns to crime". Turns out she's just writing crime novels now.
There's no need for apologies. After all, the whole point behind swearing is to indicate when something's really, really, pissed you off. On the content of your post though, I agree with you totally. Media companies are really rather conservative whores when it gets down to it. They're so worried about breaking the medium and changing things.
Part of the problem is the bean counters. They need real data, real numbers which they can then aggregate and present to shareholders and investors and use to help set milestones. The problem with "free" is that it's a gamble, and it's lacking the real numbers that they need. There's not a huge amount of data on it. I wrote an article on "Increasing Your Market With the Creative Commons" on the subject of books for Writing World, an established writing resource website. The article actually influenced the owner of the website to release a lot of her own content (hundreds of articles) under the Creative Commons.
One of the biggest questions I get in email though is what data there has been on this. Every few weeks I'll get someone emailing me telling me that they'd like to go the Creative Commons route but their publisher is hesitant, or wants numbers. Writing World has a bit of emphasis on self publishing, so hopefully people take note of the Creative Commons when licensing their work on Lulu.com and the like, but as for old school media outlets I think this is still a ways off. The only exception being Baen Books and the Baen Library, as mentioned in my article.
Good post. Not quite sure why it got modded troll. I'm going to look into this match a bit more. My own personal opinion here without knowing any of the data beyond a bare glance at the Wikipedia article would be that this particular match drew people who were already interested and knowledgable about chess.
The example, specifically how the choices were picked by a small group of top players before selecting further reinforces what the AC I replied to above theorized. The Crowds are great at making a yes or no decision based upon data, but there is still a need for some central authority or leadership to present them the more proper choices.
A more interesting experiment would be to see exactly how another match would turn out without said central authority. My theory is that if a forum community was set up for the match that some authorities would tend to float to the top naturally from there and would again present the smaller group of choices. With everything purely anonymous though, who can really say who would do better. I look forward to such an experiment, and if you know of one please link me.
This is of course assuming you're still reading this days old Slashdot article. I hope metamoderation kills your troll-mod.
Awesome reply. I think you got to the heart of what I was attempting to get across. When given a question whose answers can be skewed over a median value the crowd is likely to have some level of success as shown by the "Ask the Audience" lifeline of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. However, when the question at hand comes to something requiring a level of debate or complex thinking the crowd model breaks down completely and leads to biases, defense of an idea, and a variety of other factors that affect human debates.
For the record, I think Wikipedia is an awesome resource. It generally is factual on a given topic and often has insightful concepts which transcend cultures. However, it's not really an indicator to me of the Wisdom of Crowds because it is not a "crowd" that maintains it, but a small group of intelligent and strongly invested editors.
The digg commenting system would be probably the best example of the wisdom of crowds.
I'm not really seeing the relevance in your reply given the context of my post. My post says nothing in relation to your first line at all. It says that the poster child of "the Wisdom of Crowds" doesn't even use crowds, but instead small groups of interested parties. You've not really disproved my statement in the least. You've just simply stated "not true at all", presumably due to some pre-existing bias as you've given no argument as to why it is not true.
Would you consider an angry mob to be an example of the wisdom of crowds? What about a group of rioters? Armies which are very large crowds well versed in the application of violence are broke down into small groups individually lead by a single authority each answering to a higher authority within the larger group. In the case of armies, the "wisdom" or intelligence is sourced at their leaders with the majority of the crowd just following along.
Indeed, I know of no example where the wisdom of crowds is really effectively demonstrated. Sometimes you'll get the odd member saying something intelligent, but its not the crowd as a whole. This one odd member would probably be just as intelligent or insightful on the subject without the crowd. Please explain to me, if you can, why any of this is not true and/or why the "Wisdom of Crowds" is actually a valid concept outside of marketing.
As the parent mentioned, the "Wisdom of Crowds" put Bush in power. Honestly, it seems to me to be nothing more than overhyped bullshit pushed alongside "Web 2.0" and other over-hyped concepts that are filling the current bubble with hot air. People love to cite Wikipedia as proof of the wisdom of crowds, but let's stop and analyze that for a moment:
Who controls the content of Wikipedia articles? Is it a large crowd of seemingly random contributors each imparting their own bits of wisdom? Or is it a small set of contributors providing the base of an article with a few mostly minor revisions submitted by random people passing by? In my experience, it's the latter. Usually a small set of people, no more than 3 to 5 which make the core of a Wikipedia article.
These same people are also generally the ones that cultivate the article and keep it consistent and well editted. Occasionally these same few people come to disagreements and end up in "edit wars" in which they call in another set of few members interested in judging to judge the issue. There's no "crowd" at work here, it's a lot of small groups of vested individuals who have interest in a particular domain and an efficient way of contributing and collaborating in that domain.
There may be hundreds of such groups, but they typically stick to their domain or they become edit whores and stick to minor revisionary work on a large amount of articles. Either way, I don't see much of a "crowd" once I break it down and look close, much less a wise crowd. Have you ever noticed that different subsections of Wikipedia have their own "feel" or "identity"? Maybe the particular manner of phrasing or the type of consistency shown throughout that sub-section which differs somewhat from another unrelated domain. This is largely a result of edits by the aforementioned small group of vested individuals. Each group leaves their own tint which colors a section and gives it life.
Wisdom of Crowds? No. Small, intelligent groups of people focused on achieving a well defined goal? Yes. If you really want to test this "Wisdom of Crowds" concept, take a look at SomethingAwful.com or any of the various large web forums and learn of the "Wisdom of Crowds". Even there, it's generally a very few amount of people contributing intelligently with the rest just being meaningless drivel. This meme needs to die.
Slashdot Mirror
We're all nerds here, and this seems to be a real problem. What can we do about it? Can a Firefox plugin be made to weed out flagged squatted domains? Have you physically complained to Google either through email, written letter, or even in a blog posting/article? Or on the other end, perhaps we could evelop a software suite for parked domains that provides relevant information. Parked domains are annoying, but they'd be less annoying if they were still relevant.
It'd be kind of neat if accidentally typoing britenyspears.com brought up feeds with news on Britney Spears along with ads and other monetization schemes rather than just some boring Ad Directory that most are currently like. Anyway, my point is: If you hate this so much, why aren't you doing something about it? What can we do to stop it, or help to solve it? I don't imagine we can completely rule it out but there's bound to be plenty of ways we can weaken its hold. The world can't change unless you try to change it.
Do you honestly find domain parking to be evil? It may not be classy and domain squatters tend to piss me off but I still wouldn't classify it as evil. The problem isn't so much the squatters as the idiots that actually click ads through squatted domains and the registrars that allow "tasting" to begin with. Google isn't the only player in the industry as far as Domain Squatting goes and thus them not being in the market doesn't really stop it, it just limits the amount of competition.
If you care so mch about domain squatting then come up with ideas to deal with it. Perhaps a Firefox plugin that auto-removes flagged squatted domains from search listings or an article with practical tips on how to combat domain squatting and what Google and other content monetizers can do to curb squatting, increase useful content, and increase their bottom line. These people aren't evil and they also don't share your utopian ideals about the way things "should be". What they do listen to though is money and tips on how to gain money. I've found the best way to push Open Source, Open Content and other methodologies is to show businesses how being nice and open benefits them.
For more info on how to do that, check out my Internet Marketing Blog.
The McDonalds Coffee incident != Frivilous. Quit eating the dogfood and research the actual facts. The coffee was knowingly and neglectfully above safe levels for hours.
I will grant that we are a sue happy society, but there's a reason for that. Being an American who's lived in Canada for a couple years I'm noticing there's a lot more government support and government agencies here. The government regulates the corporations so the average Canadian doesn't even need to think of suing. In the US on the other hand, the government tends to be a bit more laissez-faire except when they want to increase barriers of entry for their friends in the industry, and as such the people are the ones that regulate the industry.
Lawsuits are a form of regulation. Lawyers suing companies for being dickheads is actually noble behavior. I think too many people buy into the "sue-happy" stereotype without considering why it exists. Given the power of lobbying, lawsuits are the only thing that really keeps industry in check by the people.
I've known for quite a while that piracy would be a great marketing tool. I actually wrote about the Creative Commons being a marketing tool on the popular writing e-zine "Writing World": Increase Your Market with a Creative Commons License
Interesting fact with that article, shortly after writing it Moira Allen decided to post all of her hundreds of articles under the Creative Commons as well. The real revolutionary thing about the Creative Commons and piracy is the viral marketing side of it. Companies have known for a long time that giving away free samples is awesome marketing, they just tend to cost considerably but with digital media this can be negated to almost nothing.
Sure some people don't buy your stuff, but in a lot of cases they wouldn't buy it anyway. You can also make up for a lower quality product by pirating it. For one thing it's off limits, for another it's free, and lastly it's obviously liked by other people otherwise it wouldn't be pirated. All these factors combine to make piracy and Open Licenses very powerful marketing tools that most companies are just missing out on.
I've actually covered the benefits of Philanthropic Marketing on my blog. This includes Open Source, Open Licensing, and just plain helping out in the community to foster a stronger community and help it thrive. A lot of the FOSS crowd seems to be a bit socialistic in their viewpoints and try to convert people that way. I prefer to cater to their greed and self-interest which we all have and which FOSS and sharing in general are compatible with.
If anyone's interested in learning more or getting help with a philanthropic marketing campaign drop me a line at the email address mentioned on my blog.
Wow. That was incredibly insightful. I wish I had modpoints. At first I was kind of confused myself but now I really can see the potential of this. It's not exactly useful for anything that has to remain secret but there's still a wide range of applications if it's applied properly. Thanks for the explanation.
Not only are most of Firefox's "unique" features copied from Opera, but Opera is also a remarkably fast and lightweight browser with most stuff built right in. It also happens to work in most variations of Linux including Sugar and it's used on the Nintendo Wii. Not to sound like a fanboy, but it's a far superior browser to anything else I've found. Other than the source, I'm not sure I see the big deal with Firefox. It's bloated and feature light to start with and as you add on more plugins the bloat just gets bigger. Is seeing the source really worth using an inferior product?
A nice, well reasoned response. Thanks. I must apologize though as I don't have the time to research and respond to most of your points but I think you're a bit more right in this case than I am. My main problem with unions is the "Seniority Syndrome" of whoever's been there the longest is considered the best and treated the best regardless of actual skill or merit. This is not an ideal system and if it doesn't punish talented individuals it at the very least demotivates them.
I used to be pretty heavily anti-union but I think the parent post is a concise and interesting viewpoint on unions and their purpose in the past. However, I also think the Internet sort of obsolesces them to some extent. It used to be if you had a problem with your company without a union it was just you versus your boss. You could tell a few friends and they might consider what you've said the next time they try to interact with the company but your web of affect was far lower.
Fast forward to today and if your company screws you over you can blog about it, you can post it to the Consumerist. If they screwed you over for whistle blowing post stuff to Wikitruth or send notes to several prominent bloggers telling your story. Make relevant comments on forums/blogs discussing such problems as yours fell under. Pretty soon your company has been shown in a negative light to millions of people. You've got a lot more power on your side.
I don't think unions as a concept are completely irrelevant but I think they've lost the absolute place they needed before. Something as simple as creating a forum for workers within your industry that they can talk on can go a long way. Someone acts like a dick? Bloggers just blacklist them based on a few forum posts. Authoritative statements made in the forum or on a blog can go a long way towards changing things without needing to force everyone to stop working or pay dues or any such other crap.
The times have changed.
I believe the powerline internet you're talking about is called Broadband over Power Lines or BPL. As I recall there was a lot of opposition to BPL because it interferes with the HAM radio spectrum. Hopefully someone more knowledgable can chime in on the discussion soon.
McDonalds, Walmart, Target, Lowes, The Bush Regime, Kane & Lynch, Eidos, Sony, etc.
Honestly, this unionizing idea is just plain stupid. How can you unionize a very loosely connected group of people? Most of these people barely even know eachother, much less interact. What is the benefit of unionizing beyond being able to use the union for pressure which can not currently be applied?
They could always go with a Blogging Guild similar to the Writer's Guild, another group of self-important windbags, but the point of this all is kind of moot. Blogging is about freedom. Post whatever the hell you want. If people like it they'll buy your products, click your ads, make comments or whatever else. You can't really expect readers to stick around purely on account of your seniority.
Ah, the John Bobbit special. Very good choice, sir.
You have a good point in that searching through books can help you to learn all sorts of new and slightly related things on the way to your endpoint. However, society is progressing to the point where precise targetting is far preferred to generalization. We've got entire fields that require 4+ years of intense focus on just one or two small spheres of knowledge.
If you're looking to learn all encompassingly about a subject then a book is a great way to do so. However if instead you're looking to research just one particular topic within a subject or get a refresher a book is rather inefficient. Targetting allows very quick knowledge acquisition which allows us to become more efficient to focus on other tasks. Researching being faster just means you can get more work done, in essence.
Tell that to Google.
For some reason I thought Pot was outlawed to target the blacks and eradicate hemp's thread to the nylon industry. Do you have any data on it being used to target Mexicans?
It conflicts with the business interests of a politician's donors.
That was just a pisspoor example. A better attempt at the bridge sale would be to imply that I am unintelligent or unmanly after previously having implied buying a bridge to be intelligent/manly. The same method can work with "giving away value at a discount price", it just requires a creative application.
Actually, tossing an insult at someone is a *very* effective strategy for convincing them to take a particular action. There's fewer response choices available for insults, and the pride of most people reduces their effectiveness at just ignoring insults altogether. Intelligent social engineers make use of insults just as much if not more than compliments due to the fact that compliments can be looked upon with suspicion and a reverse course of action applied. People rarely consider that they may be being insulted to cause a specific course of action.
It's not really an issue of lethal rounds or nothing, it's the lower barrier of entry and lower accountability of using a taser. Would this Polish guy at Vancouver airport have been shot in the heart? Unlikely. Would he even have been clubbed? Again, unlikely. Tasers seem to take on this extra appeal. There's no accountability to using them. You don't feel the force of your impact, you're detached from the fact that your volts very well could be killing this person. In essence, you've got no negative feedback for tasering them, and thus a taser becomes an acceptable weapon at a time when weapons are not needed.
Pepper Spray, clubs, Handguns, and even hand to hand all have different negative feedbacks which inhibit their abuse, at least a little bit. A taser has none. Look at the guy that tasered a handcuffed 17 year old girl. They dropped the case, citing there wasn't enough evidence. The police force's current taser policy is clearly pretty unacceptable.
A journalist using a misleading headline? Who would have thought! The nerve of some people, I mean really. You'd think they were just trying to inflate their page views and not even bother to report real news. On that note, one of the most funny bad headlines I've seen was "J.K. Rowling turns to crime". Turns out she's just writing crime novels now.
There's no need for apologies. After all, the whole point behind swearing is to indicate when something's really, really, pissed you off. On the content of your post though, I agree with you totally. Media companies are really rather conservative whores when it gets down to it. They're so worried about breaking the medium and changing things.
Part of the problem is the bean counters. They need real data, real numbers which they can then aggregate and present to shareholders and investors and use to help set milestones. The problem with "free" is that it's a gamble, and it's lacking the real numbers that they need. There's not a huge amount of data on it. I wrote an article on "Increasing Your Market With the Creative Commons" on the subject of books for Writing World, an established writing resource website. The article actually influenced the owner of the website to release a lot of her own content (hundreds of articles) under the Creative Commons.
One of the biggest questions I get in email though is what data there has been on this. Every few weeks I'll get someone emailing me telling me that they'd like to go the Creative Commons route but their publisher is hesitant, or wants numbers. Writing World has a bit of emphasis on self publishing, so hopefully people take note of the Creative Commons when licensing their work on Lulu.com and the like, but as for old school media outlets I think this is still a ways off. The only exception being Baen Books and the Baen Library, as mentioned in my article.
For those interested, article link: http://www.writing-world.com/rights/commons.shtml
Good post. Not quite sure why it got modded troll. I'm going to look into this match a bit more. My own personal opinion here without knowing any of the data beyond a bare glance at the Wikipedia article would be that this particular match drew people who were already interested and knowledgable about chess.
The example, specifically how the choices were picked by a small group of top players before selecting further reinforces what the AC I replied to above theorized. The Crowds are great at making a yes or no decision based upon data, but there is still a need for some central authority or leadership to present them the more proper choices.
A more interesting experiment would be to see exactly how another match would turn out without said central authority. My theory is that if a forum community was set up for the match that some authorities would tend to float to the top naturally from there and would again present the smaller group of choices. With everything purely anonymous though, who can really say who would do better. I look forward to such an experiment, and if you know of one please link me.
This is of course assuming you're still reading this days old Slashdot article. I hope metamoderation kills your troll-mod.
Awesome reply. I think you got to the heart of what I was attempting to get across. When given a question whose answers can be skewed over a median value the crowd is likely to have some level of success as shown by the "Ask the Audience" lifeline of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. However, when the question at hand comes to something requiring a level of debate or complex thinking the crowd model breaks down completely and leads to biases, defense of an idea, and a variety of other factors that affect human debates.
For the record, I think Wikipedia is an awesome resource. It generally is factual on a given topic and often has insightful concepts which transcend cultures. However, it's not really an indicator to me of the Wisdom of Crowds because it is not a "crowd" that maintains it, but a small group of intelligent and strongly invested editors.
The digg commenting system would be probably the best example of the wisdom of crowds.
I'm not really seeing the relevance in your reply given the context of my post. My post says nothing in relation to your first line at all. It says that the poster child of "the Wisdom of Crowds" doesn't even use crowds, but instead small groups of interested parties. You've not really disproved my statement in the least. You've just simply stated "not true at all", presumably due to some pre-existing bias as you've given no argument as to why it is not true.
Would you consider an angry mob to be an example of the wisdom of crowds? What about a group of rioters? Armies which are very large crowds well versed in the application of violence are broke down into small groups individually lead by a single authority each answering to a higher authority within the larger group. In the case of armies, the "wisdom" or intelligence is sourced at their leaders with the majority of the crowd just following along.
Indeed, I know of no example where the wisdom of crowds is really effectively demonstrated. Sometimes you'll get the odd member saying something intelligent, but its not the crowd as a whole. This one odd member would probably be just as intelligent or insightful on the subject without the crowd. Please explain to me, if you can, why any of this is not true and/or why the "Wisdom of Crowds" is actually a valid concept outside of marketing.
As the parent mentioned, the "Wisdom of Crowds" put Bush in power. Honestly, it seems to me to be nothing more than overhyped bullshit pushed alongside "Web 2.0" and other over-hyped concepts that are filling the current bubble with hot air. People love to cite Wikipedia as proof of the wisdom of crowds, but let's stop and analyze that for a moment:
Who controls the content of Wikipedia articles? Is it a large crowd of seemingly random contributors each imparting their own bits of wisdom? Or is it a small set of contributors providing the base of an article with a few mostly minor revisions submitted by random people passing by? In my experience, it's the latter. Usually a small set of people, no more than 3 to 5 which make the core of a Wikipedia article.
These same people are also generally the ones that cultivate the article and keep it consistent and well editted. Occasionally these same few people come to disagreements and end up in "edit wars" in which they call in another set of few members interested in judging to judge the issue. There's no "crowd" at work here, it's a lot of small groups of vested individuals who have interest in a particular domain and an efficient way of contributing and collaborating in that domain.
There may be hundreds of such groups, but they typically stick to their domain or they become edit whores and stick to minor revisionary work on a large amount of articles. Either way, I don't see much of a "crowd" once I break it down and look close, much less a wise crowd. Have you ever noticed that different subsections of Wikipedia have their own "feel" or "identity"? Maybe the particular manner of phrasing or the type of consistency shown throughout that sub-section which differs somewhat from another unrelated domain. This is largely a result of edits by the aforementioned small group of vested individuals. Each group leaves their own tint which colors a section and gives it life.
Wisdom of Crowds? No. Small, intelligent groups of people focused on achieving a well defined goal? Yes. If you really want to test this "Wisdom of Crowds" concept, take a look at SomethingAwful.com or any of the various large web forums and learn of the "Wisdom of Crowds". Even there, it's generally a very few amount of people contributing intelligently with the rest just being meaningless drivel. This meme needs to die.
Now that on the other hand is a half decent and funny joke. Although a pretty poor troll if that was the intent.