Blogs and Collective Intelligence

I found the following video at the Ted.com site. TED is an annual conference in California (where else?) that highlights innovative thinking in many fields. Each talk is relatively short, which makes it possible to fit in many speakers. It also forces each speaker to be concise.

This talk is by James Surowwiecki (author of The Wisdom of Crowds) and talks about how the tsunami of 2005 was a turning point in the way social media, blogs in particular, became a crucial way to spread information. He discusses how the blogosphere is a way for decentralized “bottom up” kind of information to reach many people. He sees this as a form of collective intelligence. As his book (which I haven’t read, but which he refers to in the talk) goes into, a group or crowd often mysteriously has better knowledge than the individuals that it is composed of.

He also talks about the possible danger of people being hooked into networks and losing the power to think independently.