The wisdom of crowds is always right about opinions
July 31, 2006 – 9:47 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
If you’re looking for hard core facts, then it’s not always best to follow the crowd. But if you want to gage sentiment, then crowd behavior should give you a good idea of how the masses feel. It’s not an exact science, but it’s emerging rapidly as a very important discipline. Even the venerable CNN is looking for more user-generated content. It makes complete sense. When they’re reporting on an event like war, footable from locals who are actually witnessing the fighting could make great additions to the overall archive.
Ultimately, the crowds should make any news story better by their participation. The static way of reporting on events has its’ advantages to be sure, but not from a standpoint of timeliness. If users are part of the “news data stream” and they’re adding input to it as it evolves, then you can’t help but think that in a sense news is evolving on the internet. Is it getting better? It’s tough to judge, but I’d have to insist it’s getting a lot more comprehensive.
The web, in general, has added so much to the corpus of human knowledge, that it’s not surprising that a great number of industries have been completely altered by its’ emergence. But it seems more likely every day, that the old order way of doing business is in trouble if the business owners don’t adapt to a whole new way of doing business.
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