Harnessing the wisdom of the crowds is the principle on which the worlds most comprehensive encyclopedia (if it can be called that) i.e. Wikipedia was built on. Unlike Encyclopaedia Britannica which is created and edited by a panel of expert scholars, wikipedia was edited and continues to be edited by people like you and me. The result??Well its one of the most comprehensive if not 100% accurate information source there is on this earth.

Now use that same principle "Harnessing the wisdom of the crowds" and check what Google has been doing with its search technology over the years. It invented Page Rank mechanism which in layman terms is basically who links to whom kind of scenario. So in short google’s technology is also relying on the wisdom of the crowds to judge which site should be on their 1st page of their search.

A similar case happened just recently when facebook opened its API to allow developers to build applications for the facebook platform. Well what happened next is well known. 1000’s of applications got created and are still being created and facebook has become one of the most customizable and personalised social network with features that are virtually unending due to the new apps being created each day. Facebook is just harnessing the wisdom and knowledge of the developer community. These developers may not be fit to be hired by facebook but collectively they are the ones building the facebook platform.

Now lets look closer at home in India. A few days ago i read that Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam received close to 30,000 responses to his question posed on Yahoo! India Answers on how to free our planet from terrorism. Another attempt at using the wisdom of the crowds to solve problems facing the world.

Though the best answer above was picked by the president himself one needs to ponder whether the internet is probably the best medium to harness this wisdom of the crowds be it for market research or for a product or for solving grave problems that face the world..

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