So far, I’ve read only one book that I felt was truly outstanding on the implications of Web 2.0, though the buzzword hardly appears in the book at all. The book is Ambient Findability, and was written by information architect Peter Morville and published in 2005.

I just recently came across a Webcast that Morville did this past July for the Library of Congress based on his book. You can link to it here.

The Webcast itself is nice and clear with good sound quality. Here’s a description of it from the Library of Congress’ page:

Peter Morville, widely recognized as a founding father of information architecture, discussed his recent book, “Ambient Findability,” in a program sponsored by the Science, Technology and Business Division. Morville describes Ambient Findability as a safari of how people search for information and how they now find their way through a world of information overload. His previous book, which he co-authored with Louis Rosenfeld, “Information Architecture” was named “Best Internet Book of 1998.” Morville’s work has been featured in many publications including Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, MSNBC and The Wall Street Journal. He blogs at findability.org.

Technorati Tags: Ambient Findability

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

There have been lots of Web based Q&A services that promise custom answers from actual humans, ranging from fee-based ones like Google Answers (that works on an auction model) to the defunct FIND/SVP’s “Ask an Expert” site, to various free services like Wondir.com and the various individual locality “ask a librarian” services, to of course your own public reference library. (As Gary Price noted here)

My preference is to call on librarians when possible for quick and free answers, but sometimes a question is not really reference or library oriented one. Perhaps the question is very offbeat, or there’s a need for advice, or a strategy, or to hear someone’s experiences and not a “look up” type answer that a librarian would provide.

I’ve been playing around a bit with Yahoo Answers for a couple of weeks now, and we’ve been pleasantly surprised with the answers I’ve received. Now my expectations were quite low, and so that didn’t hurt. But while there are countless silly and meaningless questions and answers on the site, there is a good share of people who have good information they want to share, and I’ve now been the recipient of this several times already.

From a business researcher’s standpoint, you might find an answer to a question about a company, for instance, that would not be found in a standard reference work or even on the Web. Try it out–if nothing else, it’s actually a pretty fun site to play around with.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo Answers

I’m home from 6 weeks in Prince Edward Island and back to Intelligent Agent. I imagine there must be tens and tens of people who have been anxiously waiting for more blogging!

While in PEI, I saw a very funny Colbert Report episode on Wikipedia. (Know much about elephants?) I’m actually a big fan of what Wikipedia has achieved, and use it often, but like many, am also cautious, and haven’t always felt 100% confident in the accuracy of what I located. And I also get concerned when there are ignorant, purely self serving or malicious entries made on Wikipedia, and afterwords, a general dismissal in the media of Wikipedia as a credible source.

Wikipedia is an example of the theory of the “wisdom of crowds”, as described by James Surowiecki, and others. That is, under the right conditions, a group of people will typically be “smarter”—that is, come to the right solutions/make better guesses or predictions, etc. than any individual person, even when that individual person is an expert.

This theory about collective intelligence is one of the cornerstones of Web 2.0. And its validity seems to be proven out on the Net regularly: e.g. how the Internet crowd “votes” for the best sites by linking, or how Web users choose the most insightful bloggers, or through the creation of prediction markets, and via other manifestations of large, independent, aggregated group decision making. And Wikipedia of course is based on the premise that the collected knowledge of millions of people is the best way to create new knowledge.

But it’s not just Colbert that is wary of Wikipedia. The fact is, as (surprisingly) good as Wikipedia is most of the time, it is also true that incorrect information can be input onto Wikipedia by anyone, anytime, and that information may go unnoticed by the more knowledgeable users, or by Wikipedia’s assigned minders/editors for some time.

So while many voices or minds are typically better than one, there is the real problem of what happens when a single non expert contributes inaccurate information is entered on Wikipedia or other public wikis, or on a business wiki for that matter, and it is not removed.

What to do? It seems that the wisdom of groups strengthened when that crowd is filtered or qualified in some way. Say there were two groups contributing their knowledge to a wiki: one group consisted of random persons, and another of people that are pre-qualified based on their existing knowledge, skills, or commitment to the integrity of the wiki. I believe the latter crowd will be “smarter” than the first (assuming that they still operate under the correct conditions: Diversity, Independence, Decentralization and Aggregation), and the wiki would be less prone to ending up with purely inaccurate information. In essence, this is what the scholarly peer review process has relied upon—a group (not an individual) of qualified people that apply their knowledge to another person’s work.

I don’t feel that this “qualified crowd” approach is antithetical to Wikipedia’s philosophy—it’s consistent with the approach that relying on more people’s brains is better than just relying on one; it’s just that the wisdom of many qualified people will make it less prone to entering erroroneous information (innocently or maliciously) than a random group.

In some ways Wikipedia is already tipping its hat to this approach, by relying on its a small cadre of reviewers to watch over it. Perhaps Wikipedia might consider experimenting with areas where groups of qualified people can contribute their knowledge, thereby resulting in the best of both worlds: the mechanism of collective intelligence, with some level of qualification and filtering….

That’s one thought–would be interested in hearing yours…

Technorati Tags: Wikipedia

Technorati Tags: Wisdom of Crowds