The Wisdom of Crowds

Like anything else the media hypes - the incessant chatter of Twitter is driving me bonkers. I am sure at the end of the day, some usefulness will come of the latest internet obsession, but not yet - certainly not yet for our industry. I was directed to a site called Trendsmap which bills itself as "Real-time Twitter trends," to find that people were tweeting about the Kardasians - SO not interesting to me. Obviously, the show was on and the younger generation expects to be interactive with their media and Twitter is how they interact??? So looking at how to engage your customer is important for every industry, even if Twitter is not the venue at this point.

In these travels through the internet, I did find an interesting new idea that marries tweeting with the "wiki" concept. An engineer in Finland has created a way to capture the wisdom of crowds that can be immediately useful. TrendWiki "engages your networks to study problems of interest and communicates the results to the decision makers and experts." Watch Elina Hiltunen explain her program at the European Futurists Conference Lucerne 2009.