Doing the (Market) Research

So now that we’ve all agreed that The World is Flat and also that we’re a nation of people drowning in debt, Boston Consulting Group senior consultant Michael Silverstein has a new theory for us: Middle class consumers are on an eternal treasure hunt, looking for an emotional connection to our purchases,...

The Age of the Internet: Ruining Reputations in Record Time

As yesterday was deemed Fake Writer Day by Gawker, it seemed appropriate for the Denton-ites to start the day off with a blurb involving a Harvard student whose literary dreams were coming true, only to be squashed by her school paper’s revelation that she might actually be a plagiarist. Metafilter and The New York Times,...

Traffic Wars: Daily Kos Vs. Instapundit

I haven’t gotten around to reading Crashing the Gate yet, which is the new book by prominent liberal bloggers Marko Moulitsas (Daily Kos) and Jerome Armstrong (MyDD). But I did check out an extended review in the New York Review of Books. It looks like a good read. However, this quote from the review really jumped out at me:...

“Wisdom of Crowds” (cont’d.)

In a recent post, I breifly mention the notion of a smart crowd. I started to talk about this in the context of Web 2.0, the term coined in large part by Tim O’Reilly. He identifies a number of principles to help explain what this is. Omitting the more programming specific,...

“The Wisdom of Crowds”

This book by James Surowiecki shows how, under the right curcumstances, crowds can make better decisions than individuals, and individual experts. I want to spend the next few posts talking about his insights in the context of Web 2.0 and the media.

Talking about smart crowds, Surowiecki, means an assembly of people that meets four critieria: 1) it needs to be diverse,...