Business - Written Monday, March 9, 2009 by Denis Hancock - 2 Comments

NBA Team Ranker: The wisdom of crowds revealed through micro polling

For most of the last year there’s been one major point in relation to wikinomics that I’ve been trying to make more than any other – that while it’s often seen as synonymous with the “wisdom of crowds“, more often than not wikinomics-enabled strategies focus on finding (and leveraging) “uniquely qualified minds“. This is a subtle but important difference that is most obvious in the first story presented in the book – GoldCorp. Rather than being a tale of how a crowd of people came together to “mass collaborate” and create value, it was an excellent example of using transparency and the web to find those few uniquely gifted individuals that know how to find gold.

However, this line of argument isn’t meant to say that “wisdom of crowd” applications don’t exist – and I continue to look for examples that I find compelling. One that I find quite interesting right now is the NBA Team Ranker. If you launch the application, you are presented with a simple question – “Which team is better?”, from two options (say, the Raptors and the Lakers). It takes only a second to toss your opinion into the ring. But as the application does this micro polling over and over again, rotating through the 30 NBA squads in a series of binary choices, it adds up to a “collective wisdom” – a ranking from #1 to #30 for the entire league.

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