The Wisdom of Crowds: Who to Turn to?

When you are faced with a dilemma or major decision, who do you turn to for advice?

Having had experience in the past with glancing through some advice columns in the news paper or magazine and having time to look over the various advice columns presented in the assignment along with sidetaker.com, I realize that these forms of advice columns can definitely be very helpful to people when they may not know where else to turn. I also realize the importance of having someone of an impartial view consulted when looking for another opinion on a subject that needs dealing with. Many of these columns as well as the site sidetaker deal with rather personal problems or to be more specific between one person and their significant other, one who they have invested a lot of time in. In my personal experience, I have found in general that an unrelated advisor from a site or newspaper is not the best answer for me when I look for advice concerning my personal problems. Someone of this nature I will use for general information or for decisions that I feel are less important than ones concerning someone i am close to. In such situations I have always felt that it would be best to reach a decision based mostly on my own feelings or with minimal input from others who know me and have some idea of what is going on. What I have found through personal experience is that the ones with the most helpful advice possibly simply because they know how to get through to you, are other people close to you such as friends or family. Of course I have to remember that most of the time a single person can not come up with the right answer so instead it becomes about gathering the opinions of many of those around me and in the end adding their knowledge to mine to formulate a piece of advice for myself to follow. In the end I would say a group would be more knowledgeable with advice than any one single person, but remember to incorporate your own thoughts, don't betray your own beliefs.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Crowdsourcing

The book "Wisdom of Crowds" gives us readers many examples of how crowds are able to collectively make decisions that are in most cases equal to or better than decisions made by individuals or even small groups of professionals. Some internet sites have applied this method, crowd sourcing or in other words using the information provided by the large number of the sites subscribers, in their business model.

Upon further inspection of some of the provided site examples (wisia.us, marketocracy.com, and threadless.com) I believe that this business model is effective for the intended use that each site has. However, I feel as if this method is limited in its uses and that it would not be useful for all sites or situations. In the case of wisia - The Wisdom of Crowds, a question can be posed to the other users of the online community which will in turn be answered by those members in real time. For any site that uses polling as its main tool for answering questions crowd sourcing such as this is not only practical but necessary. For the site marketocracy, a number of sample investors recruited to the site, the crowd, and runs them through an algorithm that selects the top 100 and averages their investment results. This method of crowd sourcing doesn't at first glance seem like it would be effective. Comparing the sites numbers to those of the S&P 500 Index however, shows that this "m100" index does in fact consistently beat the market.

I have used sites with crowd sourcing in polls and also in forums where information can be exchanges through online communication. I would not as of yet trust crowd sourcing fully for more important decisions such as what to do with me money as marketocracy is concerned. One last example that I have encountered is one of the minimal functions in EBay, the ability of all users to rate individual buyers and sellers so others using the program will know which potential buyer/seller has a better chance of being trustworthy in payment or item quality respectively.