This Wired Magazine article examines the new ways that companies have begun using the internet to harness a type of collective intelligence.  Entitled 'crowdsourcing', this method is employed by companies large and small to do tasks better and more efficiently through harnessing a large amount of people.  The key is that for the most part, it works out well for consumers as well.  An amateur photographer who might never get a dime for his photos can now continue to take them on the side and potentially make a couple bucks from printers looking for cheap photos through sites like iStockphoto.  The consumer in this case has large enough incentives to participate, and the corporation has even larger reasons to turn to the same model. 

    While this article describes a very different process from prediction markets, it is an interesting comparison as to how corporations (and consumers) can harness and profit from these aggregators of collective intelligence.  Of course the models described in this article are much easier to adopt because they don't necessarily undermine the expertise of others, they simply look to "fill in gaps" that the market has been unable to reach.

James Surowiecki outlines through cultural examples the basic idea of collective intelligence and that time after time it is shown that the group estimate to a given problem is more accurate than most of all of the individual guesses. He then lays out a key set of characteristics for what makes a wise crowd. They are: diversity of opinion, meaning that users come from many different intellectual backgrounds; independence, that they do not rely heavily on the opinions of others; decentralized, meaning people can draw upon local knowledge, and a means for aggregating their opinions. He states that while the average is often mediocre in most cases, in decision making it is most often the best. Though he also states that collective intelligence is not always perfect, citing certain examples where experts certainly know better than the crowd.

Surowiecki lays out the particular parameters I will esxamine as a starting point in my research project in looking at the particular incentives of marketing techniques used to maintain a flourishing prediction market. The implications for data gathered from prediction markets will examine the future role of experts, building off of Surowiecki's comments. In addition this work will mark the branching off point from where I examine other definitions of "wise crowds" and how important his characteristics actually are.

This is a radio interview with Jay Rosen on the podcast show Open Source.  Rosen discusses the current trends in the media, include the communal effort by readers and administrators of the online news site Talking Points Memo to expose the U.S. Attorney's scandal.  TPM won the prestigious Polk Award for its efforts.