The Ignorance of Crowds

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Some fair points by Nicholas Carr, observing the importance of a balance between the top down and the bottom up, framed as a critique of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. I think he is misleading though, in a couple of important respects:
Firstly, he suggests that the crowd is only good at debugging, not creating. While it is true that someone needs to start the whole thing rolling, clustering, chunking and other forms of parcellation can enable a crowd-based system to evolve in small pieces. Carr mentions Linux as an example, but a huge amount of the success of Linux has to be attributed to the wider GNU (and other open source) applications that surround it. It is about building small pieces that can be assembled and reassembled.
Secondly, he has a naive view of the crowd. Terry Anderson and I have been talking a lot lately about different ways that crowd behaviour can be mediated and the different kinds of groups, networks and collectives that occur. No particular approach is right for all circumstances and there are many ways that crowds can be wise.The recommendations of Google are a good example: not always perfect, but often good enough to help us find the needle in the haystack.This is not debugging behaviour. This is generative: stigmergic but blended with collective wisdom and individual intelligence.Crowds can be subtle and complex beasts.
Created:Sat, 02 Jun 2007 19:44:49 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1291
Posted: June 2, 2007, 1:44 pm

TED | Talks | Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo (video)

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Thanks to Donald Clark for pointing this one out. This is awesome. Truly awesome. Unbelievably awesome. Astonishing. Microsoft have really done something amazing and incredible here. I never thought I’d write those words. But this is the sort of thing that will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and applaud, then come back and ask for an encore. I am humbled.
Created:Fri, 01 Jun 2007 08:49:35 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1290
Posted: June 1, 2007, 2:49 am

The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems

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Fantastic article by Golder & Huberman from 2005 observing patterns of tag use on del.icio.us. All of it is good, including a great discussion of various forms of ambiguity etc in tagging and the relative merits/demerits of taxonomies vs folksonomies, but the really interesting bit comes towards the end when they observe, and attempt to account for, a remarkable and stable consensus on proportions of tags used to categorise resources. They relate this to the stochastic urn model, observing that some of the stability is the result of imitation (what I have called mob behaviour) but some of it is to do with shared and presumably independently held knowledge (what I have called multitude behaviour).
Created:Thu, 31 May 2007 05:22:07 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1289
Posted: May 30, 2007, 11:22 pm

26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong

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A nice collection of cognitive biases that seem very relevant to social software and social navigation in particular.
I suspect that there are ways that most of these biases could be used positively in a learning context, though whether the bad habits acquired in doing so would be more harmful than the good they might engender would have to be considered carefully!
Created:Tue, 29 May 2007 03:15:58 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1288
Posted: May 28, 2007, 9:15 pm

The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth. Many-to-Many:

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Typically brilliant article by Clay Shirky who once again elegantly proves a thing that, once you know it, is completely and intuitively obvious but that, before then, is just one of life’s curious puzzles. Of course – young people do interesting, creative and novel things and exploit new technologies more easily because they know less. This is the downside of wisdom – the more you know, the more you ignore the little anomalies, the more some things seem obvious and are not questioned.
Clay suggests that this is a real and unassailable advantage of young over old, but I think there is still a chance for us oldies. They key is to completely change your intellectual and/or working life every now and then. Not just a gentle shift from one job to another that is similar, or picking up another skill that draws on your existing skills (e.g. a new language), though that can probably help, but something utterly different and, on the face of it, unrelated to what you have done before.
Created:Sat, 26 May 2007 13:14:25 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1285
Posted: May 26, 2007, 7:14 am

A new twist on anti-spam tech can help digitize books

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OK, this is really cool – putting the time spent on filling in CAPTCHAs to good use to harness the wisdom of the crowd in a big big way – 60 million eyes a day, solving problems that computers cannot solve. Brilliant idea, so many possible applications apart from the simple task of fixing weaknesses in OCR.
Just a little worrying that it could be a tempting target for coordinated practical jokers and maybe worse – CAPTCHA-bombing could be the next big thing 🙂
Created:Sat, 26 May 2007 06:05:22 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1284
Posted: May 26, 2007, 12:05 am