twopointouch » web 2.0

Memesurfing: iSlate and Social Media

Ian — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:41:22 +0000

There is a fever of anticipation over the imminent release of a tablet-style computer from Apple – let’s call it the ~~iSlate~~ [Thursday Update — actually, let’s call it the iPad — I stand by everything else in the post, though].

Nobody outside the company knows very much about how it works or its specifications, but the consensus of opinion is that it’s basically a big iPhone. Let’s imagine that’s the case, and I’ll write an apology on Thursday if this turns out to be very wrong.

It’s not just Apple that thinks that 2010 will be the year when Tablets finally come of age. Models from HP and Nokia were just two of the slew unveiled at CES a couple of weeks ago.

Now, I know that Apple UX design expertise means that their device will be poles apart from the Tablet PCs launched by these competitors or Microsoft hardware partners in the noughties, but it won’t be entirely different. The latter part of that is interesting to me, because I spent quite a lot of time with those devices, reviewing them for trade and consumer press titles. What I discovered is that they’re good at some things and less so at others.

Good for:

Reading things – but not very long things – they still had LCD screens, so still created eye fatigue. Fine for a magazine article or a blog post, though.
Filling in forms – the devices proved popular with people like service engineers, medical doctors and financial services salespeople.
Drawing things – it’s easier to draw freehand using something like a pen, rather than something like a mouse or a touchpad.

Not so good for:

Typing more than a few words – some had convertible designs whereby you could unfold a keyboard, but that made them bulkier.
Surviving in your bag – the screen needs covering so needs a sturdy secondary case, which means it takes longer to get out and at work than a conventional laptop.

In a story today that looks not totally dissimilar from industrial espionage, a research firm called Flurry has apparently tracked the application usage coming out of Apple’s headquarters to reveal some suggestions of the use cases the company is anticipating:

The mix of apps is made up mostly of media and entertainment titles, as opposed to productivity or entertainment programs — underscoring that the tablet is aimed at consumers. [my emphasis]
“In particular, there was a strong trend toward news, books and other kinds of daily media consumption, including streaming music and radio,” stated the report. Coupled with recent reports that Apple is in talks with book and newspaper publishers, the apps suggest the tablet will compete with Amazon’s Kindle e-reading device.
Across the “tablet” apps Flurry identified, it also found a strong emphasis on social networking, photo sharing and other types of social interaction.

I hope you can see where this is going: iSlate and social media in a world where all right-thinking people are toting an iSlate. Web 2.0 is all about people creating online content: wikipedia, blogs, flickr, twitter, whatever. Slate computing devices are good for consuming content – I think it’s safe to say that a modern slate will also do video quite well. And anything that’s similar to a big iPhone will have some sort of GPS capability and the capacity for Location Based Services (LBS). They’re good for creating certain kinds of content – especially pictures, but not really for creating text content. I can imagine that up-to-140-characters will be fine, but your hand will get tired after that point.

So — in a slate-enabled future of social media expect…

More: microblogging, drawings, tagging, one-click sharing, LBS, pro media by the microchunk (iNews).

Fewer: blogs, wikipedians, lengthy comments.

This is bad in some ways, of course. Social media is already criticised for its superficiality. I cannot imagine that being able to write less will improve this image problem. On the other hand, blogging and wikipeding are already far too onerous for most people, so you could say this was simply being responsive to what people mainly want to do. Perhaps more worrying is the idea that there will be less authorship in this world and more spreading and curating. Perhaps fancifully, I like to think that the ability for anyone to self-publish is an empowering thing. I wouldn’t like to think that my ability to do so would be impeded by my choice of computer hardware.

One things I will be very interested in is the camera capabilities of the device. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine people taking a photo using a tablet, no matter who designed it, but am prepared to be corrected.

Picture: iPed Multitouch Slate by Myiube

A Warning on the Web

Ian — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:29:04 +0000

In this online radio interview, internet visionary Jaron Lanier talks about the danger of Web 2.0 turning us into a collectivist digital mush. He’s got a new book out, so doing a lot of PAs lately.

The problems, to paraphrase, are these:

Collectivisation We’ve reached for the wisdom of crowds, and this silences individual voices. This blog post becomes the expression of a meme, rather than me talking, and serves to fuel advertising machines. This is a particular problem if you make your living from music, photography, writing and other creative disciplines. There’s always the next result in your Google search.

Failure to forget It’s become impossible to re-invent yourself because the Net remembers everything about you. There can’t be a new Bob Dylan because the Web will remember Robert Zimmerman forever.

Religion We’ve fetishised the Web to the extent that we regard it as a living, omniscient entity. Advertising is regarded as the most important element of the Internet, to the detriment of the individuals who create the content. This is typical of the first steps towards creating a new religion, argues Lanier.

Youthiness A popular defence is that the social web is built to reflect the norms and expectations of young people. Lanier counters that he’s spoken to a lot of young people who feel the same as him. The people speaking for young people are likely to be middle-aged business people who work in advertising.

Bubbles The Internet gives us the opportunity to meet all sorts of different people, yet the design of many social sites makes the pack mentality easier and more efficient than ever. We stick to our own bubbles and never come across these different people.

I’ve written on most of these themes before and have considerable sympathy for his opinions, while still retaining enormous enthusiasm for a lot of what’s going on. Jaron’s views (and mine) might be regarded as the next stage of the hype cycle, whereby the impossibly high expectations created around new technologies are discovered to be unattainable. This leads to the ‘trough of disillusionment’ whereby the same technologies that were previously held in such high regard are regarded as worthless or detrimental. In time, the theory goes, we recover from this disillusionment and find out what’s actually useful in this innovation.

But that would be to collectivise his opinion – and I should probably avoid that.

In the latter part of the interview, Jaron gets to debate David Weinberger, who remains an evangelist for the social web, so it’s well worth listening to the whole thing.

Jaron is coming to London in a couple of weeks, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing him speak at the RSA.

picture credit: vanz

So You Talk About A Revolution

Ian — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:03:42 +0000

Some bloggers do something called ‘live blogging’ from conferences, wherein they aim to note, more-or-less verbatim, the content of the sessions they are attending. I am far too busy with other weighty intellectual matters at conferences - Twitter messages about the speakers’ funny haircuts and who else is here from Twitter — so it takes me a few more days.

Anyway, I was at Media Futures 08 last Friday where one of the best sessions was the opening keynote from Dr. Brian Winston.

He started with a quotation ostensibly* from Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales in the Observer saying that it’s likely there’ll soon be digital revolutions in far-flung places we don’t tend to consider very much, such as Kazakhstan. With internet connections and the Web 2.0 tools that have become available over recent years, Wales says, it’s likely that they’ll be able to propel themselves very quickly through twenty years of technological progress and produce the next crop of internet tycoons.

Nonsense, said Winston. What both Wales and Wikipedia forget is that Kazakhstan has a Stalinist dictatorship. There will need to be a very different sort of revolution before there’s any kind of technological one that’s based on democratising technologies. It’s an example of the way Web 2.0 technophiles seem to find it extremely easy to forget about politics, sociology and history to try to establish the revolutionary impact of the next latest thing. They think technology has the power to change societies, whereas in actual fact, cultural and social conditions need to be met in order for technological advances to exist at all.

Digital itself has a history going back to the 1920s, he argued, which everyone conveniently forgets. And even then, it’s simply a system for encoding things. An equivalent would be the switch from AM to FM radio — and very few people talk about the FM revolution.

We are in a condition where we conveniently forget the years of discovery, exploration and mistakes that lead to whatever is in today’s headlines. We’re also conditioned into accepting the rhetoric of marketing as fact. Web 2.0 favourite theories like ‘the wisdom of crowds’, ‘the hype cycle’ and ‘crossing the chasm’ are actually commercial products, not independent academic studies.

The conditions for the emergence of new technology are cultural, not inherent in those technologies themselves. Edison didn’t ever envisage the gramophone being used to record music, because the likelihood of that use was not culturally probable at that time. The ability to create cheap electric cars has existed for years, but has only been allowed to come to life relatively recently as car companies have reached a point where they want to be viewed as environmentally responsible. And many new technologies — so breathlessly announced in the tech press and the press releases that spawn them as so very new and revolutionary — are based on fairly basic facts about the human race. People like to talk — if that’s via mobile phone, social networks or face-to-face maybe doesn’t make that much difference. We would do it anyway within the limits of whatever means we had available.

When we’re confronted with the latest, greatest, revolutionary product from the web or anywhere else, the proper response ought to be, ‘so what?’ It’s likely that there will be no sensible answer to that question, but even if there is, it will probably be about it fulfilling or adding to a social imperative that already exists. Technology, Winston argued, is not going to create new social needs or desires.

_________________

Personally, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, and I think it’s true that society creates technology, not vice-versa.

However, I didn’t used to need to know the day’s news at 7am in the morning. I didn’t used to read hundreds of people’s opinions every day. I didn’t used to hear from my friends and colleagues every day (albeit indirectly through blogs and social networks) and thus feel continuously part of an international professional community. While I could have created a printed fanzine instead of this blog, I probably wouldn’t have been bothered. It’s often remarked that before mobile phones were ubiquitous, you had to turn up to social engagements instead of cancelling. And there was a time when if I wanted to watch Dr. Who, then I had to be sat at home at 5pm on a Saturday. Some of those things are about the increasing demands for communication and information required by a post-industrial society that still needs to make a living, but not all of them.

Mobiles and web things and social networks may have come to exist as a consequence of social and cultural demand, but the consequences of their existence also go beyond what those causes required. There then emerges a two-way process whereby technology both fulfils social needs and then is stretched to create new patterns of behaviour as we tinker and test the new limits of our existence. Another basic fact about humans is that we are tinkerers and testers. Not always all of us, but enough of us to alter the nature of common discourse over time.

*Wales has since repudiated the article quoted in Winston’s talk, which was apparently written by a third party on the basis of a conversation, and has written a new one, which is more moderate in its position regarding developing economies.

Directive Number One

Ian — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:30:02 +0000

Many thanks to comrade Mayfield for his excellent presentation to the collected officers of the Social Media Commissariat … sorry Club, this evening.

To cut his talk short, he’d been thinking about the parallels between the birth of social media and the birth of print itself, as described in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe. The printing press caused a social upheaval and changes in the patterns of people’s thought that would last forever. Revolutions are often thought to be sudden and violent, but as well as that, if they are really revolutionary, they are about long-term, irreversible change.

The printing press, like the explosion of social media, changed access to the means of production and distribution of media forever. It smashed feudalism and church control. It also changed the ways in which people think — new modes of behaviour and activity like silent reading appeared. The emergence of continual partial attention through the likes of Twitter might be a modern analogy.

In a revisionist aberration, Mayfield suggested that marketing had always had a place in print, from its very origins, since early books were very often part advertorial for the author’s goods and services. He suggested in Gutenberg’s time, there were numerous helpful volumes that actually were about promoting the writer — think books along the lines of Tenne Most Efficacious Waies to Dryve Traffick to Ye Blogge. He also cited the division and combined hatred and approval created by this new media, a very familiar theme today when it comes to the media created by you and I and reactions to that from the press and the establishment.

Dialectical materialism and Web 2.0, then. The subsequent conversation revealed a few ways into such an analysis, most of which seem bleak in the short term:

(a) this apparent transferal of the means of production into the hands of the people (e.g. ‘push-button publishing’ for everyone) seems like a revolution. But that apparent liberation is contained within the illusion of freedom granted by a very few corporations. Fox, Google, Microsoft, Facebook. At the next level, our ISPs are owned by even fewer, larger players. Our sense of freedom and ownership in this space is a delusion. The recent Usmanov outage proved how fragile this freedom is. If corporations are the new states, then much of social media might be classified as Ideological State Apparatus to obscure the real relationships between those states and the peasantry.

(b) this is even more the case outside the bourgeois social media intelligentsia (viz. anyone likely to attend SMC). Most people are joining in, if at all, through portals controlled by media giants. Unwitting collaborators, my comrades, not revolutionaries. Maybe not the same media giants as ten years ago. But the same forces, same money behind them. Don’t mistake withdrawal from one account and investment into another for a sea change in how capitalism works.

© the myth of transparency. Transparency used as a way to bully lesser powers. Corporations remain psychotic: under US law, they are incapable of acting altruistically. If they do anything about the social media revolution, then it will be because they think it will be the best way to drive profits. Watch them, catch them out, be suspicious.

(d) so what/where is the revolution? Regrettably,there was reactionary talk based upon non-scientific doctrine during the evening that ‘life will out’ and that censorship and control will ultimately be bypassed because that it is the destiny of any new communications medium. Applying the scientific method of Marx and Lenin instead, we might conclude that the ongoing struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue and that the inevitable victory of the working classes will ensue to similar effect. Even the benighted might hit upon the truth sometimes. Print led to education, secularity and the spread of scientific thought, eventually, even though its first thrust came from the opposite direction.

Be watchful comrades. The day is near, but not yet at hand.

Update: somewhat more sensible posts on the event from Alan and Jenny.

A Better Impression

Ian — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 14:56:41 +0000

The UK’s best-known website auditing firm, ABCe, will move to measuring unique users instead of page impressions as its mandatory measurement metric. Page impressions have come under fire as a metric for several reasons, not least the ability to fake results by splitting a story over several pages.

This is good news for professional blogs: Because blogs tend to have their most recent stories all on one page, page impressions per user tend to be low. You have a look at the new stuff and move on. A measurement that is based on the number of readers they have will better reflect their popularity. This should allow popular blogs to compete more easily for mainstream advertising, which has often been sold on a cost-per-thousand impressions basis in the past.

It’s good news for Web 2.0 sites too: A lot of Web 2.0 sites use dynamic pages, as you know. Instead of reloading the page, new information comes streaming in via an XMLHttpRequest instruction. Think about something like Writely, now called Google Docs. You might use it for three hours and never reload the page. If that was your business, and you sold advertising to support it, then you wouldn’t be too happy about being judged on page impressions.

The Ajax Myth

Ian — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:10:29 +0000

Mis-Information Week perpetuates the myth that Web 2.0 is all about AJAX. The standfirst to the article lays the groundwork, suggesting that this is purely about technologies, when surely approaches would be a better way to begin:

To bring your site into the Web 2.0 world, you need to know about Ajax, ActiveX, RSS, and other key technologies.

As the intro confirms, this brave new world of Web 2.0 is supposedly all about appearances: “you ignore the new lingo at your own peril; enterprises that put up plain-Jane Web sites today risk turning away the more discerning browsing customer.” But it’s not just about AJAX. Oh no. It’s also about littering your site with pointless bling: clever developers “spice up content and make their sites more dynamic … Use polls, surveys, RSS feeds, and tag rolls.” (OK, I’ll allow them RSS feeds as important).

Only on page four of four is there a hat-tip to the idea that the way sites work with users might have the least importance: “I also include social aspects and smaller, lightweight components as keys to Web 2.0,” says Tony Karrer, the CEO of TechEmpower.

I have to assume that the piece was either poorly commissioned or subbed rather heavily, since the author, David Strom, is actually a lot better informed than this piece suggests.

Anyway, back to the point. No, it is not about AJAX. It’s not really about languages at all. You could write an application in fridge magnets and it could still be called Web 2.0 if it meets other criteria (lightweight models, perpetual beta, read/write access, collective intelligence, etc). Yes, a rich interface is also an important part of the idea, because that enhances usability — the human angle again, see? And those rich interfaces are something that AJAX facilitates. But that’s all it is, part of the toolbox. No-one, to my mind, has put this point better than Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield:

I’d bet the future is less the Matrix than Soylent Green. Less semantic fuzz than social discovery. Less artificial intelligence than human intelligence. Less automation and more augmentation.

Soylent Green is a 1973 Charlton Heston movie. At the end, he discovers that the new miracle food from the Soylent corporation is made of dead bodies. “Soylent Green Is People!” he bellows to an unhearing crowd in the last line. The same is true of 2.0 applications and sites.

The Next Next Big Thing

Ian — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 10:52:44 +0000

…is Who 2.0. That’s according to an interview with Tim O’Reilly, the man who popularised Web 2.0. On Basque news site eitb24, he said that he thinks:

…certain kinds of databases are going to become really big and really useful. We are just in the early stages, digital identity doesn’t really work yet. But that will, you know, start to coalesce, where all these different sources of identity will start to be resolved and connect to each other. And weâ€™ll have a rich identity system you could call Who 2.0.

I definitely agree. Think about the amount of information that Yahoo! has about you. It’s got most of my email, my address book, my pictures and my bookmarks. Google has got my search history, some more of my email and pictures, my RSS feeds, my calendar and another address book. Both know about this blog, and know it’s connected to all that other stuff.

O’Reilly is bullish that this will be empowering: “What web 2.0 teaches is that we’re using people to make computers smarter.” A web that knows what you like, what you probably want to do next, and the information that is relevant to you. Larry Page once said: “The ultimate search engine… would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.” It’s going to need to know a lot about you in order to do that. A move towards single-sign on, whereby your web identity across Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, e-Bay and the rest remains the same, will help to facilitate this ‘rich identity’.

It’s also quite worrying to a lot of people, though. If your Firefox password manager — the single sign-on we have today — turned out to be flawed (gulp) then that’s quite a big portion of your life on show, and abusable. Think about the explosion of identity ‘services’: Garlik, Reputation Defender, OpenID, ClaimID, SAML and OSIS, to name but a few. Identity Theft is already rife — 4% of us suffered it this year alone. Probably a lot of people aren’t yet aware of how much information about them is openly available on the web. As internet use matures, they’ll become more aware, and there will be greater outcry against incursions into our privacy.

The trouble is that we’re moving forward without having cracked the basic problems around security. Password-based systems suffer from user laziness, get hacked or the information given away for free. Smartcards and the like get stolen, forgotten or lost. Public/Private key programs are too complex for most users. Biometric systems are expensive, not universally available and are also said to be ‘too secure’ — once someone figures out how to fake your fingerprints, for example, how will you ever get your identity back? Combinations of these techniques are more secure, sure, but since their ingredients are vulnerable, they’re ultimately vulnerable too. I’m no expert on this matter, but I’m well-aware that there’s considerable unease about the inability of machines to tell if it’s really you.

And that’s why Who 2.0 is going to be such a hot potato. On the one hand we’ve got people like O’Reilly, the top brains at Google and the like trying to make the web do more. To make it work more intelligently according to what sort of person you are, what your interests are and the context. On the other, web users are thinking ‘hang on, how did you know I wanted that? I’m not comfortable with this.’

More than a Feeling?

Ian — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 12:13:36 +0000

Nick Carr comments today about the competing definitions for Web 2.0 and the use of jargon, concluding that at the heart of the matter is … well, nothing. Writing about Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0? essay, he states:

O’Reilly provided a series of observations and impressions, and, really, that’s the best way to approach any discussion of “Web 2.0.” You need to “walk around the subject,” because if you try to get to the center of it you’ll find there’s nothing there.

I’ve written about this at some length before. If no-one agrees about what Web 2.0 is — and believe me, they don’t — doesn’t that mean it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes? That there’s ‘nothing there’? I can understand Carr’s point and appreciate why he says it, but I think he’s wrong. Things that are quite big and complicated are very difficult to define and people disagree about them. Philosophers have spent at least 3000 years attempting to define ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘beauty’, and ‘knowledge’. They are things that most of us would agree exist yet we can’t seem to get a handle on their precise meaning. The typical philosopher is pretty bright, but can they agree? Can they heck.

Look at the very beginning of O’Reilly’s essay recounting a discussion in early 2004:

The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having “crashed”, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity.

At that point, when the discussion started, there was no talk of the web as platform, collective intelligence, AJAX or any of the other memes surrounding this subject. They all got added on afterwards. What Dougherty was talking about was economic regeneration and a fresh excitement about the Internet following the first wave that ended in the NASDAQ crash of 2001. That’s why it’s called 2.0, not because it’s got tags or ‘UGC’ or data as the new Intel Inside. Well, that, and the fact that it was a pretty buzzy name for a conference.

So where does that leave us now? Well, it means that Web 2.0 is quite an appropriate description for ‘exciting new applications and sites’ — that was how the expression was coined. It may well have tags, social media, networks and all those shenanigans, but it doesn’t need to. The main thing is that they are innovative. And the thing about innovative sites and services, if they really are innovative, is that they are a bit different to the things we had before they arrived. Web 2.0 is a moving target, sure, but that behaviour goes to the heart of its meaning.

Update: if more than five people link to this post, I will declare a moratorium on headlines involving lyrics from Boston.

Flog More Stuff 2.0

Ian — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 17:18:11 +0000

Public Relations in the Web 2.0 era? A new white paper has been produced by Squiz in association with Text 100 PR called Communications 2.0. It’s available here (registration required).

The paper discusses what Web 2.0 is, how businesses might adopt some of the approaches it brings, how their PR will change as a result and ends with a ‘manifesto’…

To practise Communications 2.0 is to:
Cede a portion of editorial control to your users â€“ give them proper channels where they can get involved
Treat your web site as a database of content, not a static publication â€“ use open standards-based technology
Incorporate user-generated content into your web site to help cross and up-sell your services â€“ offer comment sections, forums and content-tagging
Place a web component within every single communications exercise â€“ all your audiences are on the web so this is mandatory (to ignore the web would be like having an early 20th century ad campaign without newspapers!)
Look before you leap â€“ Listening and monitoring through tools such as blogs should become a no-brainer. Itâ€™s an excellent way to dip your toe into the water, understand whatâ€™s going on and even get input from your community on the best way to pursue further engagement
Assess your organizational readiness and prepare your engagement carefully — you need to consider HR, legal and IT issues before you embark on a new â€˜communications 2.0â€™ strategy
Develop a new PR policy â€“ decide what you should do, why youâ€™re doing it and then, in the words a famous sports shoe manufacturer, JUST DO IT!
Consider the use open source software in order to deploy new communications channels cost-effectively â€“ donâ€™t reinvent the wheel: the solution is out there somewhere
Introduce new web-based tactics quickly and often â€“ you have nothing to lose — everyone remembers the successes and forgets the (inexpensive) failures
Measure everything that you do, all of the time â€“ itâ€™s easy with the web. Make sure you get your hands on decent web site stats and talk to your PR/web agency about how you can track campaigns more effectively
Invest in the tactics that are working and pull the oneâ€™s that arenâ€™t
Approach the discipline of communications as a process, a dialogue â€“ donâ€™t be afraid of the market talking backâ€¦.embrace user comment and content and put mechanisms in place that encourage it â€“ itâ€™s far cheaper than a focus group

I know the paper wasn’t really intended for public consumption but I find this a little disturbing. They’re talking about the Web 2.0 era or attitude purely as a way to flog more stuff (check number 3). User content as a cheap focus group (12). Also, don’t 6, 7 and 9 contradict each other? Either you act quickly because failures don’t matter (9) and JUST DO IT (7) or you plan carefully (6). For me, one of the key advantages of this brave new world for companies is that it gives them the chance to be better and make better stuff. The paper doesn’t say anything about that. But maybe that’s just me in my little dream world.

I’m sure that my PR colleagues Simon, Simon, Antony, Drew and Stuart — who actually have some expertise in these matters — will have more to say on this subject.

Wisdom and Intelligence

Ian — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:52:31 +0000

One of the cornerstones of most definitions of Web 2.0 is the idea of the Wisdom of Crowds. In Tim O’Reilly’s seminal essay on the subject, he talks about the blogosphere being an example of this:

If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls “the wisdom of crowds” comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value.

Other examples which are sometimes cited include digg, Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia and del.icio.us. People come together to solve problems and their combined effort produces better results than an individual editor or news team could manage.

However, we’re actually smudging together two contrasting decision-making mechanisms here. Henry Jenkins points out in a post related to game design that there’s a significant difference between Pierre Levy’s idea of Collective Intelligence and James Surowiecki’s topic, The Wisdom of Crowds.

The Wisdom of Crowds emerges when data from a number of sources is aggregated. The people contributing need to be acting autonomously according to the best of their ability and in competition with others. The famous example is guessing the weight of the prize bull: the average of people’s guesses turns out to be the correct answer.

Collective Intelligence, on the other hand, emerges through deliberation, where people share, alter and evaluate other’s contributions to arrive at common ground.

As Jenkins notes, Wikipedia is much closer to this second model, Collective Intelligence, than the Wisdom of Crowds approach that finds the mathematical mean of all the suggested ‘answers’. The same would be true of Yahoo! Answers and del.icio.us, and indeed of most Web 2.0 applications that revolve around a community approach.

The Wisdom of Crowds model does in some ways apply, however, to things like the digg front page**, flickr interestingness and Google PageRank, which are algorithmically determined based on the combined anonymous and competitive input of many people.

It isn’t really a question of one of these models being better than the other, Jenkins concludes. It’s more that we’re not going to get very far unless we realise that they are two different things:

Both “collective intelligence” and “the wisdom of crowds” offer productive models for game design but we will get nowhere if we confuse the two. They represent very different accounts for knowledge production in the digital age and they will result in very different design choices.

I’d contend that the approach chosen by an application designer very much depends on the nature of the problem that is being addressed. Both could be correct depending on the situation, and probably one approach would be more sensible than the other for any given application. Completely anonymous postings to Wikipedia with no editing hierarchy whatsoever probably wouldn’t be such a great plan, though it would bring it closer to the wisdom of crowds model. On the other hand, the collective intelligence method of measured deliberation and discussion about which stories to put on the front page of digg or which sites should appear at the top of Google searches probably wouldn’t work out too well either.

[**Actually, digg is interesting in this regard. The submission of stories is not anonymous, nor is the voting. This has led to lots of accusations of bloc voting, allegations of a self-reinforcing elite of top diggers, and adjustments to the promotion algorithm to try to prevent this. It is a strange amalgam of social community and wise-crowds news aggregator. The owners (and presumably enough of the users) want it that way. If the owners didn’t want the social community aspect, and the problems that has created, they’d remove all mention of user names and make voting anonymous. It’s my belief that the gaming aspect to digg is entirely intentional and part of what appears to make it so addictive to its fans.]