Wisdom as a Service (web2.wsj2.com)

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One of the most novel aspects of Web 2.0 is the ability to literally meter the collective intelligence of your users and leverage it as a discrete service in its own right. A lot of people are still struggling to absorb this piece of the puzzle yet it's already a potent force all over the Web today. Using it well and fairly will be a major competitive factor heading into the future.

Because of this, there are a growing set of implications to keeping and using the knowledge gleaned from collective data contributed by users. Use of this information is already more widepread than a lot of people realize. Highly valuable data is generated all the time, often indirectly, by everday user activity such as searching or preferring to use certain site features over others (Flickr monitors this in almost real-time for example). This activity will only become more widespread with Web 2.0 concepts explicitly encouraging harnessing collective intelligence as a best practice. Implications of such information harvesting include, as pointed out by Jeff Jarvis yesterday, some sure-to-be contentious ones including who ultimately owns and controls the wisdom generated by crowds?

Jeff weighs in that the crowd owns the data. I say he's absolutely right, even though that cuts directly into the economic models of those who would invest in the infrastructure of such information economies. For example, why would Google offer up their search behavior database to others, even though it was donated by its users. Such questions will inevitably work themselves out and I imagine some form of revenue sharing or otherwise explicit value exchange agreements will ultimately be made between services and their users.

For now, there's a morass of intellectual property and ownership rights that are unresolved today. And while this does not mean Web 2.0 efforts should wait for the answers (quite the contrary), it does suggest that the issues could end up working themselves out against the desires of either the users or the creators of services that profit from wisdom at the crowd level. It'll be interesting to watch how this plays out over the next several years and the results will shape the Web landscape for sure. As Jarvis points out though, gettting the biggest pools of collective intelligence established early is critical and so the smart players will bet that it will work out mutually for everyone in the long term and try to get there quickly today.

Also, for another view, read Aninda Roy's good sound bites recently posted about the circumstances in which crowds can be smarter.

And lest we forget, Web 2.0, like the original Web, will be built on the backs of its users, but even more so. But that's the way it should be. For this Web is all about us, who we are, what we're like, and want we want. Let's just make sure we don't lose control of that.

Technorati: web2.0, socialsoftware, wisdomofcrowds

posted Thursday, 27 October 2005

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email: dion (at) sphereofinfluence (dot) com
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