What I liked most about the book was the clever variety of well thought out characters and scenarios. How would people, companies, and institutions fare if plunged into a full scale zombie war – an unusual question, but one that the book tackles with great relish.  Interestingly, one of the scenarios described in the book gave me a new insight into wikinomics (see other wikinomics zombie mentions here, here, and here).  [if you plan to read the book, stop here, minor spoiler ahead] 

There’s one event described early in the zombie wars which pits America’s military might and technology against an invading army of mindless zombies. The book does a great job of describing a modern battlefield technology which allows combatants in the field to communicate and exchange information with one another (including live video transmitted by others). The description got me thinking… wow, great stuff, wikinomics, distributed collaboration, and collective intelligence in action. Cool.  Sure enough, I was duped. It turned out (in this fictional case at least) that this advanced battlefield technology contributed to the mighty army’s defeat. Instead of spreading intelligence and coordinating responses across the troops, it helped spread panic. Frightening visuals of defeat and voiced fears were instantly shared with everyone… and the result was a frightened mob, not orderly action from soldiers. In the end, the higher ups had to turn off the video feeds and try to reassure people that all was well (and by that time it was not).   

The lesson for me is that succeeding with wikinomics takes much more than just simply connecting people. A crowd can be “smart”, or it can be a mindless mob too. While James Surowiecki wrote about “The Wisdom of Crowds,” in 2004, I highly recommend Charles Mackay’s counterpoint written in 1841 called “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Crowds, even when highly connected via digital technology, do not automatically become smarter. In fact, as Mackay observed, sometimes they become mad and delusional too.  The difference is less about the process of magically connecting people, but more about the architecture for connecting them. HOW people are connected, seems to make the difference between  wisdom and madness… call it appropriate collaborative architecture. At the moment, finding the right collaborative architecture appears as much art as it is science, but we have lots of examples (and smart community builders) to point the way. Perhaps readers of this blog can share their own insights into these principles.

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.

What’s interesting about this, in my opinion, is the micro-polling component. An alternative for gathering collective wisdom would have just been asking people to rank the 30 squads, than averaging it out – but this is a very time consuming process for individuals which would limit participation. The question, of course, is how “good” the results are that roll up from the micro polling process.

Now it’s hard to create a definitive answer to this, but if you are an NBA fan and scan the list you are almost certain to say it’s at least close – teams like the Lakers, Cavs, Celtics, Spurs and Magic at the top, and teams like the Wizards, Clippers and the Kings at the bottom. In fact, it’s very similar to Power Ranking lists like this one from NBA.com. The only big argument people may have is the Spurs position at the top – but given recent history (the Spurs winning the NBA title in odd years – 2003, 2005, and 2007), this might just turn out to be pretty smart.

So at minimum, it looks like an interesting approach. I wonder how many other micro-polling possibilities – where you ask simple, binary questions to a massive audience, rather than a detailed question /poll that each person must answer – are out there?

While you’re at it, just saw another note from the founder of OurRaceCar – you should check out his site, looks pretty interesting (along the lines of MyFootballClub, but with significantly less diving ).

There are currently 63 languages open for translation on Facebook and they will be adding translation capability for languages that read from right-to-left such as Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Now that’s pretty impressive, how much money and how much time do you think it would have taken if Facebook had hired a person, or even a team of people to translate their site into French or Spanish (let’s not even start thinking about 63 languages).

The iphone is just one example of the many devices that users are looking to customize. Another interesting gadget that has been a target to hackers is the Wiimote (remote control for the Wii); and there are some pretty cool applications that have been developed for it. One of the more popular hackers is Johnny Lee who has posted a series of how-to videos on YouTube for his various hacks. Lee has figured out ways to mod the Wiimote to do some amazing things such as ‘tracking your fingers with the Wiimote’, and creating ‘low-cost multi-point interactive whiteboards using the Wiimote’. These different hacks are possible because the Wiimote’s expansion port protocols are “very open”.

What’s surprising (or maybe not so surprising – more disappointing) to me, as I learnt in a Globe and Mail article is despite Lee’s popularity Nintendo has never contacted him about his innovations and refused to comment on the [Globe and Mail] story. Companies have a huge opportunity to leverage the wisdom of crowds – these developer / hacker communities.

I’m sure companies like Nintendo and Apple have amazing talent inside their company, but this is only a fraction of the smart people in the world who can continuously improve and innovate on your products “the world as your oyster” so to speak as opposed to “your company as your oyster” (similar to Don’s frequently referred to GoldCorp story). These hackers look at products a company releases and thinks of different ways to make it better; why not take advantage of them and help support these initiatives? In certain cases companies may view hackers’ activities as detrimental but it’s all a matter of perspective and how a company chooses to approach these situations. There is a huge opportunity here to find interesting and functional uses to products that regular people (or even respective company employees) would never have dreamed of doing.

For a taste of what you can do with your very own Wiimote here’s Johnny Lee’s video for Head tracking for Desktop virtual reality displays using Wiimote:

Facebook’s engineers have developed the Facebook ‘Translations’ application. The application provides a list of words and phrases that require translation, the user submitted translations are then voted on and lastly the translations are tested and verified. Users with the most accepted translations are featured on their language’s ‘Translations Leaderboard’. This is an ingenious way for Facebook harness its loyal user base to help it expand and grow since there will always be users willing to help translate (for free). This point is further reinforced since over 100,000 users have installed the Translations application. A key piece to the translations is ensuring the culture relevance with a tone that is consistent with local cultures. So what better group of people to translate your site than the people who are actually using it?

The main points of criticism addressed in the Globe and Mail article are (1) Why doesn’t Facebook pay for translators and why would individuals want to help Facebook make more money?… and (2) Concern over the quality of posts. Although I recognize these as legitimate concerns, they are separate from the points I’m addressing in my post. Facebook wants to grow and expand as quickly as possible, hiring translators is a slow process and it’s harder to guarantee that the translation will be written in the tone you want (this is opposed to the user submitted, voting and rating system). What’s more, there are users who are excited to be a part of the expansion process of a platform they use daily – helping to bring it to ‘their’ language. The voting system and reporting feature are designed to ensure a certain level of quality and there are other complimentary solutions Facebook can employ to deal with this issue such as hiring professional translators to look at the end product as a final copy edit etc.

Overall, I think using the wisdom of crowds to translate its website is a great idea and shows Facebook’s faith in the Web 2.0. Currently it’s building Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish and Dutch sites. Spanish, French and German versions were launched this year. The Spanish versions took four weeks to complete while the German version took two weeks.