I love this story today on the BBC website about back-seat or user-generated football management. It is an extraordinary example of how the wisdom of crowds concept that underpins social media technology is infiltrating everyday life.
I really hope it is successful … my only concern is that a large part of the enjoyment of football seems to be complaining about the manager’s selection decisions … if they ‘democratise’ refereeing too, there won’t be anything left to shout about!
The debate about what Web 3.0 (… yes, I know 😦 ) means – if anything at all – is picking up a head of steam. While many of us mere mortals are still digesting the concept of Web 2.0, some smart-aleck had to go and move the goal posts in to the middle-distance once again!
There’s a good article in the Guardian on-line today on the subject which caught my eye. There’s a nice quote from Jason Calacanis:
“Web 3.0 is the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform. Web 3.0 throttles the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ from turning into the ‘madness of the mobs’ we’ve seen all too often, by balancing it with a respect of expert”.
What struck me about this is that it describes pretty well the use of social media tools in a corporate context. What I mean by this is that within the confines of a corporate intranet with a limited user base, the wisdom of crowds theory does not directly apply. Rather than distilling the truth from a huge ‘crowd’ of amateurs, the intranet user base is made up of small groups of ‘experts’ in the context of their function within a company. So rather than attaining ‘truths’ through a process of mass distillation, in a corporate context you tend to arrive at ‘truths’ via a much more micro-collaborative publication process by small groups of experts on social media platforms. And, generally speaking, those experts are ‘trusted’ by the rest of the user base and so their collaborative outputs are trusted too. Sounds a bit like Jason’s Web 3.0 definition.
I can’t wait for my next conference presentation: ‘Web 3.0 deployment on a corporate intranet’ 😉
Inside out 