Wisdom of the Crowd

Lately I have been thinking about the wisdom of the crowd. With the recession is all around us, social networking websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are becoming more active. Since I am a very regular LinkedIn users vs. Facebook or Twitter, I want to share my observations on LinkedIn. With all the groups that I belonged to in LinkedIn, it gets very depressing when I see so many brain powers looking for new opportunities. It would be interesting for LinkedIn to run a little survey to see collectively how many years of professional experiences are now on the street.

That leads to my next thought. Would it be great if somehow one could harness this unprecedented level of expertise for the next wave of innovation? Social networking was born during the dot bomb which eventually led to Web 2.0. And that's because we wanted to leverage the Internet to create a highly linked community. So how can we do the same thing this time around?

We have seen that Linux and open source software benefits from the wisdom of the crowd. Social networking sites have great number of users but have companies taken advantages of this crowd yet? There are now books written about how to use LinkedIn or Twitter to your business benefits. That remains to be seen if and how successful that would be.

For now, I continue to ponder about the wisdom of the crowd. Care to join me?