The Wisdom of the Crowd

Last week, my parents tipped me about a television program of Labyrint (Nederland 2). This turned out to be an interesting topic for my new blog! The program was about the power of a crowd, and how this power is increasingly used on the internet nowadays.

Cow experiment
Labyrint has replicated an early experiment, by which a large group of people had to guess the weight of a cow. The expectation was that the intelligence of a group of people is higher than the smartest person of that group. Requirements are that the group is diverse in knowledge and experience, and that people guess independently.

The wisdom of the crowd was proven by the early experiment. However, the Labyrint experiment failed: the average estimation of the weight of the cow was 552 kilo’s, while the actual weight was 740 kilo’s! How is this possible? Labyrint explains that people might have googled the weight and the study was probably too casual. In addition, nowadays people are not as close to nature and agriculture anymore.. there must be knowledge in the crowd!

Watch the entire tv program:



Crowd sourcing
Foldit is a computer game by which people can collectively help to calculate the development of a protein. This prediction is important because the structure specifies the function of the protein. Foldit is one of the first online initiatives for crowd sourcing. People help each other, mistakes are neutralized this way, and the average is close to the right answer.

Monk is an other example of such an initiative. With this computer program, people can collectively help to decode illegible historical documents.
This way, small contributions result in big solutions.

Developments
A more recent development is the situation in the Middle-east, where one revolution is followed by the next. People share their knowledge via social media and blogs, and provide varied and detailed information this way. Twitter is an other recent development where organizations can retrieve information from groups of people for several purposes. Micro-blogging can for instance predict movements in the stock market.

I think in the future the power of the crowd should be, and will be, used more effectively. I’d say: exploit that crowd! Especially if it’s also for entertaining purposes (computer game) or informational purposes (middel-east), it is an optimal win-win situation.

iPad 2 stimulates digital magazines

Tablets urge the magazine business to be innovative. For a long time, it seemed as if people wanted to keep the experience of reading a printed magazine. This now seems to turn and tablets become more and more important in digital reading.

The iPad 2 is recently launched in the United States and is becoming a new success story. The new iPad is faster, thinner and lighter and has extra cameras to improve videoconferencing. Experts even expect the sales of this iPad 2 to outperform the previous version. It will be available in the Netherlands from the 25th of March. Since the iPad is perfect for reading, it’s about time that magazine publishers nestle in this business!

Tech magazine Bright has recently developed a new magazine app for the iPad. Bright Screenzine is distinct from other magazine apps because the content differs from their printed magazine. It is a, complementary, digital magazine only! However, reviewing customers on the website of Apple aren’t that enthusiastic about it yet. They are doubtful whether it is worth paying for. The payment of online material is still a difficult issue for commercial companies such as Bright. Since most online products are for free, the customer has high expectations of an online magazine purchase.

Most Dutch magazine apps that I find on the internet are for free. There are several virtual newsstands such as Zinio, but there are only few entire app-supported magazines. Last year I went to a seminar about the innovation of magazines for my HBO graduate internship at Label strategic media. One of the spokesmen was from Bonnier, which is a Swedish publisher who was one of the first to publish an iPad app for their magazine. The audience of publishers differed in their opinions whether these innovations affect the magazine business positively or negatively.

On the one hand there are doubts of publishers, who are generally traditional and used to printed magazines. However, they realise they need to anticipate on these new technologies. On the other hand there are doubts of readers about whether they should pay for it or not. Perhaps the magazine business needs to find other ways to gain money, e.g. advertising or special memberships. The iPad 2 is certainly a new stimulus to explore these options!

Reality mining

Everytime you make a phonecall, data is collected about you. The phone company keeps track of the duration and frequency of conversations. Perhaps you have GPS on your device and use Google Maps, thus your location can be traced. It is also possible that your internet usage is tracked. Companies can use this data to improve their products and to anticipate on the actions of their users.

Datamining is the direct search for (statistical) relationships within large sets of data, for scientific or commercial purposes. Patterns in datasets can be found to a)classify information, b) detect dangerous activities or c) learn from it. The interest in datamining is increasing, which is particularly due to the growing databases. I never realized datamining was so huge, until we had a guest lecture by Eric Postma last week, in the course Business Information Technology.

There are many methods for datamining, and one of them is Reality mining. Reality mining is the collection and analysis of realtime data of human social behavior. The goal is to identify predictable patterns in human behavior. An example is location mining, by which an organization keeps track of the location of employees with the use of GPS.
According to Technology Review Magazine, Reality mining is one of the "10 technologies most likely to change the way we live".

Obviously, privacy is an issue for these new techniques. It is important to know who receives the data and what they do with it. It is highly undesirable if everyone can access the phone conversations you make! However, if well used, these techniques can have great advantages. It could make life much easier when patterns in live are found and organizations can anticipate on this by, for example, automatically notifying people or automatic privacy settings.
Another example is that researchers of Microsoft are mining cabs to create faster driving paths for online maps. As you can see, the possibilities are endless, if the data is used well!