Five Great Ways to Harness Collective Intelligence

I've been developing http://chuquet.com for over a year now, and I never knew that it was a Reverse Intelligence Filter. Wow.

Chuquet.com has a reasonbly complex way of filtering 'interesting' stuff from rss/atom feeds based on the number of unique feed references to a link plus how recent the link was.

This means that stuff that's getting a lot of interest over a short period of time will come up higher than items that everyone is linking to. You'll see a new item with four or five references hit the top while an older link with forty or more references appears lower down.

Chuquet.com is still being enhanced, which is why I haven't done a lot of shouting about it. In the next couple of weeks it will be offering tag and opml-driven searches, plus RSS and OPML search result output.

I'm still debating with myself as to whether I should allow users to 'rate' items a la reddit/digg or simply rely on the reference/time filter.

Thanks for the pointer to Ellyssa's article... that's the best overview I've read. I noticed that your examples of collective intelligence harnessing each involve a very public implementation. I wonder how the rules change for smaller communities, e.g. a private wiki in a 10 person company. Arguably the reverse filter is not as critical, since the scale is smaller, and *everything* is relevant by definition. (That said, if you participate in a bunch of private spaces, a summary view becomes more important).

I think the folksonomy arguably becomes even more powerful in smaller, contained groups. Tagging applications here can possibly go beyond indexing/categorization/topic discovery and enable light process management, e.g. "in-process", "bob:review", "steve:favorite".

Excellent post - I enjoyed it.

I agree Patrick and folksonomy is underrepresented in Web 2.0 software still and when done, is often done poorly. I look forward to lots of improvement and more widepread use.

Additional information can be found here in an earlier article of mine if you're interested.

Best,

Dion

curious

This was very helpful. We've created Public Insight Journalism at American Public Media (americanpublicmedia.org/publicinsight). We've built a network of 23,000 and regularly target questions to them, the answers to which public insight analysts (our version of reverse intel filters) sort, distill, and pass on to journalists to inform our news covreage.

I'd say we do 1 and 2 great, but we could stand to figure out 3, 4 and 5.

Could I suggest a sixth model for "harnessing collective intelligence"? These would be utterances combined from many sources that nonetheless achieve a high degree of coherence and result in what could be called a "self assembling message." Reputations and rumors are like this: in both cases, a lot of variations and conflicting ideas become ironed out by the paraadoxical network process of achieving fusion through diffusion. There's a terrific study of both the process and the effect of network utterances: Tamotau Shibutani's Improvised News. There are plenty of examples on the Web, from open source to collaboratoriums of all sorts. We need a name for these collective utterances. My candidate would be Noospeak -- indeed, could anything be further from Orwell's Newspeak than web-enabled Noospeak?

(I'm writing a posting called "From Newspeak to Noospeak:)

Folksonomy is at its beginning, so it's partial and incomplete. I believe that web 2.0 is mainly trying to organize the web : searching keyword with google is becoming less and less attractive because of the amount of data available. Web 2.0 companies provide a way to add metadata to the web content to be able to quickly and efficiently retrieve data. Harnessing Collective intelligence is either : - being able to brings a lot of people to do the job for you (1-Be The Hub of A Hard To Recreate Data Source or 4-Provide A Folksonomy), - finding a way to reorganize existing data to bring more efficient search capability (2-Seek Collective Intelligence Out or 5-Create a Reverse Intelligence Filter)

I'm not sure about 3) Trigger Large-Scale Network Effects : This is more for me the use of a new technology to do what some people have done for years. When a union organizes a strike this is what I call Large-scale network effects.

This is a great article. Tim O'Reilly often talks about the participatory aspects of Web 2.0, but this is a great breakdown of the areas and ways it can applied. Something I think businesses need to heed. In our case at TekTag.com, we're just starting the journey toward providing the community a place for tech support using bookmarking and folksonomies. Feedback welcome.

TJ