Montreal Social Media

The main speaker of last Wednesday event organized by Journée Infopresse was James Surowiecki. He is the author of a column on business and finance called “The Financial Page”, published in The New Yorker. His presentation was about his best-seller book called The Wisdom of Crowds. FYI, I tried to find his book last Monday but I’ve quickly realized that most of the bookstores in Montreal are non-bilingual (French version supposed to come in april). Actually the lady from my neighbourhood’s bookstore told me to go downtown in order to find a spot to buy the book (since I live in the northern part of the island, I ended up without the book).

The power of collective intelligence
There are some great thoughts behind Surowiecki’s presentation but it seems that I wasn’t the only in the crowd thinking that his formula sounds a bit like what we call ‘the average’. According to me, if you are problem solving and you make sure to have a diversity of people thinking on a specific solution, it just makes sense that you will get a fair result (specially if you have people with independent background and if you are aggregating the results). Anyway, the guy is a great speaker and he’s giving a lot of examples to back his theory.

How the Wisdom of Crowds can apply to social media sites

If you are already familiar with social medias, I would strongly suggest you to take a look at what muhammad saleem describes as his journey through james surowiecki’s wisdom of crowds. For those of you less familiar with SMO and SMM, msaleem is a well-known digger who wrote few very interesting posts on topics such as Why do we participate on other social news sites?, Is socializing ruining social news?, The easiest way to make your community happy and more.