The wisdom of the community
All roads are leading to a community-based information ecosystem on the social web. This is the beginning of what could be called the Wisdom of the Community.
The intersection of the real-time Internet, the social web, personal networks and dynamic conversation platforms, has entrenched social as the basic language of online interactions and communities as the nexus of all activities.
This is not the traditional Wisdom of the Crowds idea. That theory always seemed impersonal, anonymous and flat to me. Crowd-based collaborative and important milestones like Wikipedia broke new ground but this was never a community of people. Useful but not truly social.
A lot has changed. Internet technology has enabled it but people have embraced the inherent power in real-time online communications and behavior has changed accordingly including how we acquire information and value it. I’ve blogged on this recently.
We’ve moved from anonymous to transparent personas, from pseudonyms to public profiles, from closed to open networks and from static, one-sided exchanges of the forum world to dynamic fluid conversations built on Disqus and other systems. And smart people like my friends Mark Essel and David Semeria are blogging and creating platforms that build on and extend from these ideas.
In a phrase, we’ve become more social by nature and that social, open poise has driven communities to form around rock star bloggers, topics and neighborhoods. And around each of us as well.
But the change I think is larger and more far-reaching and touches on how we value and receive information and decide on what to purchase.
Yelp is a good example. It’s certainly social but Foursquare as a community network of recommendations will trump it over time. When your friend says the expresso at their local spot is great, and updates that information dynamically (with daily specials and coupons) that is more valuable than a disconnected personal comment on Yelp by some stranger.
Or wrapping social into search by interweaving Twitter streams with Google search makes everything more pertinent and real time. But I’m much more interested in the recommendations of my networks.
Or compare the recommendations from Amazon readers to the value of a friend on Facebook going on about a book they read. No comparison.
I think that Yelp and Amazon and scads of travel sites will either get smart and build filters to move from random social recommendations to our personal and authenticated social nets or a plethora of scrappy smart folks like Foursquare will shift the balance of power and eat their breakfast (and post on it in real time to their friends if they liked it 
).
Social noise is not the same as community value.
And this is the evolutionary process on steroids:
- From the impersonal world of transactional e-commerce and catalogs
- To the anonymous crowd
- To the authenticated and known
- To the social and personal
- To the dynamic community as the center of our socializing, learning and purchasing networks
The Wisdom of the Community speaks to a dynamic, personal and smart ecosystem that is in itself, a filter of the net’s and the world’s information. Each of us creates their own network and people filter and create information that works in strata of value around each of us at the center of our respective communities.
It’s the intersection of communal and personal. For everyone. And that is what makes it work.
