Harnessing the Wisdom of the crowd

How We Benefit
The old saying 'many hands make light work' is especially true in the digital age. The crowd refers to any group of people, be them a physical crowd at a county fair, or a group of people separated by thousands of miles on the internet. In this weeks article we will explore who is using the crowd and why it benefits us all

A Little History
When Google came up with its ranking system based on links, in 1996 it was major step forward in search. Instead of just indexing the web, Google was able to find the relevance of websites based on the number of links back to it.

The basic concept; the more people link to this page, the more value it has. This was an early attempt to harness the wisdom the crowd.

Years earlier, Yahoo! attempted to index the web by hand. While the World Wide Web was still fledgling, it was possible for two people to manually list websites and categorize them.

Years later, that idea would be simply impossible and indexing the web would need to be done through automated Web crawlers or "Spiders".

However, while a Spider can read a web page, it's hard for it to know the value of the information. So Google "crowd sourced" it. While a few people couldn’t manually read every website and assess its value, a few million could.

By counting the number of links back to a site, Google could tell value of the content. Every time a blogger or webmaster links to another site, he or she lends creditability to the site.

Social Networking
Recently crowd sourcing has become far more common. Digg.com and Stumpleupon.com allow people to rate website and news stories. The front page of Digg is based upon what's been 'Dug' up by the community.

YouTube allows people to rate each video out of five stars, and even rate the comments on the site thumbs up or down. If a comment gets enough thumbs down, it's hidden from view.

Twitter works similarly. Each user has a list of followers, a list of people who they follow, and a list of lists they appear on.

You can judge someone's relevance by how many people follow them, and see what lists they appear on.If you find someone's input valuable, you can put them down on list of interesting people. Conversely if you find someone annoying, you can list as a "spammer".Even Facebook allows you to share sites and videos with your friends. Post the latest funny YouTube video on your wall, and you're friends will see it in their news feed.

But what does it all mean? It means two things. Firstly, that people (not computers) are best equipped to decide something's worth, and secondly it's the democratization of media.

A few big companies largely control radio and television, and can decide who gets airtime. On the other hand, anyone can post a video to YouTube. Just as important, anyone can rate that person's submission.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is great example of the wisdom of the crowd. Despite the bad reputation for being inaccurate, Wikipedia is in fact more accurate then Encyclopedia Britannica. Nature Magazine recently compared 42 articles from Wikipedia as well as Encyclopedia Britannica, and discovered Wikipedia had 4 errors per article while Encyclopedia Britannica had just 3. However, the Wikipedia articles averaged 2.6 times longer then Encyclopedia Britannica's. Meaning Wikipedia is more accurate page per page.

Wikipedia requires about 9 million dollars a year to run (mostly for bandwidth), however the value of the editing that takes place on Wikipedia (based on a modest hourly wage) is hundreds of millions of dollars."The greatest lesson of Wikipedia is that people are basically good" – Jimmy Wales (Co-founder of Wikipedia)

Mahalo
Sowhat of Yahoo!'s "antiquated" idea of indexing the web is by hand? Enter Mahalo. Mahalo's directory employs human editors to review websites and write search engine result pages. These pages include text listings, as well as other media such as picture and video. Each Mahalo search results page includes links to the top seven sites, other categorized information, and additional web pages from Google. The company also employs freelancers to create pages for piecework compensation in the Mahalo Greenhouse - prior to appearing in the main index, a full time staff member approves the pages.By the end 2007, Mahalo had already indexed the top 25,000 search terms.So what's old is new again, and people are what count more and more in our increasingly digital world.