The Elusive Fish — Creative Services

Logitech on the YouTube

The video of bowiechick and her webcam that I linked to has now been viewed over 70,000 times.

While many of the comments surrounding this video were suggesting that Logitech ought to be cutting her a cheque, I’m wondering why they aren’t making an offer for the site itself. Or for that matter, any of the other manufacturers of webcams, camcorders or portable media devices. It seems a natural fit and would give an exclusive audience of potential buyers. As we shed our roles as consumers of content to become creators of content, there’s surely a greater opportunity for those who sell the tools of content creation and the devices we use to enjoy that content. At the very least, why are they not banging down the door to become major advertisors on these sites?

Kodak, Fujifilm, Canon or one of the camera manufacturers should have been the ones to buy out Flickr. By sacrificing a month’s worth of hit and miss, scattershot ads by way of print, radio and television, they could have enjoyed a regular and ongoing relationship with their direct target market.

How many opportunities to build longterm relationships are sitting out there whilst the money continues to chase a shrinking audience that doesn’t want to talk let alone trade?

Wisdom of Crowds

An article in today’s NYTimes discusses a company, Rite-Solutions, which has adopted a prediction market as a means of soliciting and aggregating the ideas and opinions of the entire work force of the company.

“Mr. Marino, 57, president of Rite-Solutions, says the market, which began in January 2005, has already paid big dividends. One of the earliest stocks was a proposal to apply three-dimensional visualization technology, akin to video games, to help sailors and domestic-security personnel practice making decisions in emergency situations. Initially, Mr. Marino was unenthusiastic about the idea — “I’m not a joystick jockey” — but support among employees was overwhelming. Today, that product line, called Rite-View, accounts for 30 percent of total sales.”

What I wonder is what the role of the executive heirarchy is in such a situation. If the organization as a whole is capable of making decisions the president would have ordinarily vetoed, and these decisions result in significant sales growth, then what role does the president play?

Just curious.

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Just finished listening to the audio of James Surowiecki’s presentation at SXSW. I’ve not yet read James’ book, but the gist of it is that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”

The key seems to be ‘under the right circumstances‘. Surowiecki’s conditions for the right circumstances are diversity and independance of opinion and a decentralization of knowledge. Then there must be a means of aggregating these individual views to form a collective decision. Further, to make use of this knowledge, there must be an actual ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer and a clear understanding as to what the problem is.

While there may be evidence in the book that contradicts me on this, I would say that the crowd must have some inital basis of facts and experience from which to work from.

James gives an example of naval officer John Craven who was searching for a missing submarine. Craven took the best guess of a wide number of professionals (mathematicians, salvagers, naval officers, submarine specialists). Not one of these expert guesses were anywhere near the sub. However crunching the individual gueses together using a statistical formula, Craven was able to predict within a couple hundred meters the actual position of the missing vessel. This is a very powerful case for the wisdom of arguments but… would Craven have been successful if his group had consisted of wheat farmers, beaver trappers and vacuum cleaner repairmen?

As Rob May points out in an essay critiquing the Wisdom of Crowds, “the crowd would say that evolution is false. Does that matter? No, because most of the crowd doesn’t know the difference between a genotype and a phenotype. If you don’t know basic biology then your opinion on evolution is irrelevant.” Rob makes some other persuasive points worth a read over at his blog Business Pundit.

I’m not persuaded that the crowd opinion, aggregated or otherwise, holds wisdom, I will grant that there is distributed knowledge and that James’ conditions for wise crowds provides an excellent means of extracting that knowledge with minimal bias or outside influence.

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