The "wisdom of crowds" motif has become a tired cliche in online circles in recent years. With the latest in low-cost interactive Web technologies, though, there finally seems to be a real wave of experimentation underway in how to harness the knowledge of the masses.

The range of that experimentation is intriguing. Two of the companies presenting at the Demo conference - a showcase that tries to filter out the best tech start-ups, though the "winners" of this contest still have to pay $18,000 to show up - represent the extremes.

Paul Pluschkell, founder of Spigit, spent much of his career on Wall Street, and it shows. He has devised a full-fledged stock market-like game for exposing and rating new ideas. The notional currency of this system is the spigit - players start out with 25,000 each and "invest" their money in what they think are the best ideas in the market.

It looks dauntingly complex. Ideas have to clear a number of hurdles - among other things, they have to generate buzz, attract a certain number of pageviews, and find approval with people designated in the system as experts - before they even make it as fully-fledged "companies" to be traded on Spigit’s secondary market of ideas.

Yet Pluschkell has some impressive early users. SAP is trialling the system as a way to surface good ideas among its workers. It already has an internal social network, but clearly this doesn’t have the built-in incentives needed to get people to play. Another new "prediction market" on display at Demo is Fluid Innovation, which asks users to guess at the value of new software products (it’s aimed at companies looking to license out software they developed for internal use.) This may sound like a job for experts, but thanks to the wisdom of crowds it should only take a couple of hundred semi-informed guesses to yield a useful answer, claims Andrew Allemann, the company’s president.

At the other extreme is Ami Kassar, chief innovation officer of credit card company Advanta. He was looking bleary-eyed this morning after spending much of the night watching how his new baby, Ideablob, fared on its first day in the wild. A system for people who have a vague idea for starting a new business but don’t know what to do next, Ideablob is as amorphous as the name suggets. Users enter a one-paragraph description of their idea, then let it loose for others to comment and vote on.

So what’s changed since the days when chat rooms ruled the Web? According to Kassar, it doesn’t take much to turn the random postings of the many into a more useful and directed conversation. Just apply the better user interfaces of Web 2.0 and a simple rating system, he says, and users respond.

Another new start-up applying that approach is Attendi. This is dressed up as a search engine: enter a term and it returns a list of people who have had conversations on the system about that subject (Attendi is built on Jabber, the open-source messaging technology.) Users get to vote on each other, creating "experts" who rise to the top of the search results on each subject. Attendi also shows presence: if you have a question, it aims to link you in a live chat with someone else on the system. That conversation is indexed for future use, and can be viewed by anyone on the system.

Complex or simple, these new experiments all rely on one thing: a willingness on the part of the masses to tell the world at large what they think on a whole range of subjects. How powerful is this urge? Who knows. But at least better tools are starting to appear to find out.

September 26th, 2007 in Internet | Permalink