B2Bridge

We all appreciate the power of social media, i.e. the use of collective intelligence to come up with a good approximation of 'the truth'.

And the successes are there. Wikipedia, a flagship of the social media, has the experts running out of their ivory towers or else become irrelevant. Certainly, information is becoming more open and democratic, which is not a bad thing.

But sometimes social media fail spectacularly. For example, take digg. I've entered the term for my field (electricity), and organised the search for the most popular articles (i.e. the most dugg), only to be amazed by the result:

1. the first story is about compact fluorescent lamps. OK, a story we've heard a million times, but probably does not come as a surprise since digg is 'general media', at least as far as electricity is concerned
2. the second story is something I will let you find out for yourself, as my good friends at B2Bridge will probably not appreciate it being reported here
3. the third story is about a Lego Aircraft carrier completed. Impressive, but thinking about electricity, it would not be in my first 3 things to think about.

You can repeat this small experiment for your own business area.

Two of the above 3 stories have probably been selected for their entertainment value, and if this is your criterion, digg has not done a bad job.

But stating that digg is only about entertainment would not be fair. I'm sure it produces more relevant results in other areas for which it has been designed. Note that for 'electricity', there is no obvious digg category to post.

Groups can make intelligent collective decisions, provided that a number of conditions are met. The decision of digg as a system does not ensure 2 of the four conditions, and therefore, digg results had better be taken with a pinch of salt.