Discussing about the various ideas related to collective intelligence of a crowd was extremely enlightening. Certain scholars and authors believed that the quality of dicussion and decisions made by a group is diminished as compared to when they are made by certain individuals. At the same time a select group believes that under the right circumstances a group makes a decision whose quality can supercede that of even the smartest individual in the group. I think it is a topic that can be debated on and on and we can still have two parties leaving with the same beliefs they came in with. In the end I felt the key to the whole discussion was the term right circumstances. When the circumstances are right, meaning team dynamics, chemistry, diversity, etc. it is possible to get a decision and discussion that is not possible to obtain from one outstanding individual. But at the same time if these circumstances are not so called "right" then it will turn out to be the opposite. Those are my conclusions in the end. It shows me to be a diplomatic person in the end, but I do believe group dynamics, chemistry and diversity are keys elements in making a team successful. Besides that it is also the desire of wanting to work as a group (aka being a team player) rather than look for just ones personal glory. I think it has prevailed for groups throughout the world. Political parties and sports teams never seem to produce the desired results when all the "superstars" of their field are put together in one group. Instead, it always the team or party of lesser knowns that seems to come up with better solutions and managed to out do the "superstar" team. Being a sports minded person I can think of the last world cup in Germany as a perfect example. Brazil with the likes of Ronaldhino, Ronaldo, Kaka, Robinho and many more stars not only underperformed but also produced boring football and did not entertain. Infact only when the team stars were replaced by certain lesser known players did the team begin to gel and show its real potential. Well in the end its like I said, it all boils down to the "right circumstances". Another wonderful example that came up was in regard to the show "Who wants to be a Millionare". It was shown by research that 91% of the times the crowd gets the answer right. That is a phenomenal percentage of getting the answers right considering the fact that the crowd is not even labelled within the judges or even panel of experts/scholars.
All this talk about crowds, discussion and decisions makes me realise the power of diversity. It makes me realise that many different individuals can provide so many different insights to a particular topic than just a single individual. This slowly brought us into the differences in the concept of web1.0 and web2.0. Prof. Gilbert used the example of a paper encyclopedia (web1.0) to the online Wikipedia (web2.0). See one of the reasons paper encyclopedias keep getting outdated year after year is because there is new information out there that has to be put down and that may be a new point of view has been uncovered. But the Wikipedia concept is a lot more efficient. It puts together ideas of every single person who updates it and also can be updated at any time. It is a case of having the right circumstances where web2.0 applications integrate interaction to such an extent that people are more involved and sharing more than ever to keep information upto date. It is such a simple idea but yet so powerful and is really changing the mindsets of many individuals!
Thinking about all this brings a wonderful movie to mind: Goodwill Hunting. In the beginning it shows how a group of great mathematicians and scholars are put together but still take so long to figure out math problems. But a janitor roaming the lobbies of the school actually managed to beat them to the answers. Well besides just watching the movie for this I do recommend watching it, it really is worth the couch, eye strain and popcorn!
Something Technical
Now after we were done discussing the whole crowd concept along wit web 1.0 and 2.0 we moved on to figure out how google got to where it is today. Well basically google seems to provide the right search results every time you use it and it does it even better than any other search engine. Google uses what is known as web spiders to form a so called index of all the content of the web, storing headers, phrases, etc. but most importantly page ranking. It is a smart concept were pages are ranked for the information and it places the page ranked highest as its first results for a search for particular parameters. Not only does this tend to give us pages we always want to read, it also leaves Google as one of the sole search engines able to do this and hence the success and growth of the Google brand name. Anyway, once we place a search Google brings up every phrase, character, heading, etc similar to our search parameters from the index formed by the spider and places the results for us based on the page ranking system. In plain english it sounds like something really easy but its not! Ask the other search engines, they're still trying to figure this one out!
High-level architecture of a standard Web crawler
Source: Wikipedia
Nearing the end of the seminar we discussed something called Second Life. Now I've heard of this before but I was never really aware of the power of it. It is basically a so called "game" in a virtual world that allows people to create their own characters, businesses and do as they please under anonymous names. The brilliance of it is the market research performed as it has a total of 3,131,375 people (Source: Second Life). This actually helped me touch upon and revise a bit of the marketing module I had taken in my first year at NTU. It is in infact a "tool" a lot of companies are using to create estimate targets and also control their pricing.We also discussed about how US mobile operaters bid to be exclusive carriers of phones for a limited amount of time to gain the upper hand over its rivals. The most recent example is that of the iPhone and how Cingular will be the only operator providing it initially in the US! I won't be surprised if Singtel or may Starhub actually adopts a similar method. They can be sure that I am going to follow them if they stock the iPhone. M1 is also the only provider in Singapore providing the Palm Treo 750 in a 2 year plan! It is an interesting and powerful way of gaining market share and I am really surprised providers here have not been taking advantage of it that much as yet. I am sure that had Starhub or M1 been the exclusive provider for say the MotoRazr we would have a new rank 1 mobile provider by this time in Singapore!
Last but not least a small discussion was held on how Mobile commerce is changing the world we live in and how it can be incorporated into our daily life. We discussed about using it for buying movie tickets and have been asked to come up with slide presentations of new ideas to use Mobile technology to aid Jurong Bird Park provide its commentary and shows in many universal languages. Hopefully the project goes well and be sure I will have a small review on it in my next post!
1 comment:
I really enjoyed reading this entry, especially your contribution on Second Life. Keep it up!
Post a Comment