Web 2.0 Social Search — Wisdom V/s Stupidity of Crowds & American Idol
Would a panel of 100 experts on various forms of singing/experienced singers be a better/fairer group to choose the next America or India Idol? And what connection does sms voting on "Idol" have with Social Search? To me, voting via mobile phones (as is done in American / Indian Idol) is a special case of the kind of Social Networking/Search phenomenon that Web 2.0 focuses on.
(To clarify my example further: In Indian Idol 1 person can vote as many times as he/she wants and induce others to do the same through a campaign. There is no limit, no quality control e.g. the validity of the person’s knowledge of singing…all that matters is that sickeningly greedy TV program producers launder dirty money through a sms marketing program).
If you have been irritated and/or bothered by the validity of sms voting rules followed by American Idol or Indian Idol to choose a winner – then you will like the thoughts of Nicholas Carr and Greg Linden on the challenges that Social Search is facing.
Although, I have used the obvious flaw of American Idol or Indian Idol — the same flaw would appear in any social search mechanism set up without rigorous quality control and filtering. As Greg Linden says:
Summing collective ignorance isn’t going to create wisdom. Take a majority vote from people who don’t know the answer, and you’re not going to get the right answer. There may be wisdom in that crowd. There is also a lot of noise. Separating the wisdom from the noise is the real challenge.
Nicholas Carr goes ahead and expresses his frustration by using the term "numbskull" while explaning how flawed it is to believe that High Quality Social Search (a process which American idol and India Idol employ via a voting process – to choose a winner) is yet possible and even fair:
Although wikis and other Web 2.0 platforms for the creation of content are often described in purely egalitarian terms - as the products of communities of equals - that’s just a utopian fantasy. In fact, the quality of the product hinges not just, or even primarily, on the number of contributors. It also hinges on the talent of the contributors - or, more accurately, on the talent of every individual contributor. No matter how vast, a community of mediocrities will never be able to produce anything better than mediocre work.
…A relatively few people hold a relatively large portion of the smarts, the expertise, the contacts, the political savvy and so on. Getting those people - the meritocratic elite - to contribute to a collaboration platform is a big challenge facing Web 2.0…Those people, to speak generally, tend to be the busiest (the most in demand, anyway) and the least likely to have either the time or the interest to suffer the contributions of fools…As earlier knowledge-management failures have shown, the elite often have the least incentive to get involved, and without them, the project’s doomed.
I hope that besides Yahoo! (YAHOO) and other leading Internet vendors who are building Social Search Engines — American / Indian Idol TV producers take a cue from the blogosphere’s thinking around Web 2.0.
Tags: 157, 196POSTED IN: Seriously Funny, Social Search, Yahoo
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