IP Democracy: Blending the Wisdom of Crowds, Algorithms & Editors

In the wake of recent efforts to hack Memeorandum, Pete Cashmore asks the question “Humans vs Algorithms: Who Should Edit Web 2.0?,” which he follows with a second post entitled “Hacking Memeorandum: More Proof That Algorithms Don’t Work.”

As you may already know, my feeling is that humans are generally better at editing than algorithms, but by the same token you could say that the main algorithms in use today (Google PageRank, Memeorandum, Google News) are largely based on human decisions, where a link generally counts as a vote. At the other end of the spectrum, you have sites like Digg and Reddit, which are entirely edited by humans in a distributed way.

But I’m not sure if it’s really a case of humans versus algorithms: I think the future could lie with services like Wink, where Google’s search results are rated, tagged and built upon by human minds. In this way, humans could make up for the obvious failings of algorithms - namely the scourge of spam and splogs.

As Pete suggests, the optimal model seems to be one that strikes the right balance between the speed and precision of algorithms, the collective wisdom of the crowd, and the specialized expertise, insight and experience of some form of “editors.” It also seems that there’s a whole lot of effort focused in that direction from virtually every corner of the web, software, media and telecom industries…and that, ultimately, we’ll all benefit from the race to strike that balance and harvest the value it generates.

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on November 9, 2005 11:26 AM to IP Democracy