In an article entitled “Collaborative knowledge gardening”, Jon Udell writes:
“Feedback is immediate. As soon as you assign a tag to an item, you see the cluster of items carrying the same tag. If that’s not what you expected, you’re given incentive to change the tag or add another. If your items aren’t confidential and online-only access is sufficient, this can be a great way to manage personal information. But the real power emerges when you expand the scope to include all items, from all users, that match your tag. Again, that view might not be what you expected. In that case, you can adapt to the group norm, keep your tag in a bid to influence the group norm, or both.”
“These systems offer lots of ways to visualize and refine the tag space. It’s easy to know whether a tag you’ve used is unique or, conversely, popular. It’s easy to rename a tag across a set of items. It’s easy to perform queries that combine tags. Armed with such powerful tools, people can collectively enrich shared data. But will they?”
I’m only done with the first 30 pages of The Wisdom of Crowds, but I’m sure that James Surowiecki would say that people will “enrich shared data”, if the right circumstances are present. One of the key points that Surowiecki makes is that in order for crowds to be “smart”, they need to not be influenced by other members of the group (they need to be independent) If they are influenced, they will only be as smart as the smartest person in the group, which defeats the purpose of the “wisdom of crowds”.
Please bare with me as I try to form my own theories of the positive aspects of social networking and collective intelligence and how they can effect information professionals and help us not only work better together, but, more importantly, do better work for our patrons.
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