Tom’s Wordpress Blog

trying to post from iPhone again, this time using the code setting. Which seems to work fairly well, with full use of the predictive typing on the keyboard. Not sure how I’d handle HTML tags though. Better than the last time I tried it, so that’s good.Grown to love the predictive typing. It would be nice to have for any keyboard Any day.

I wrote earlier (on my wordpress blog) about collaborative web filters, especially the Cool Tools mini review that kicked off my interest. The idea of such filters (Newvine, Digg, etc.) is the visibility of the web-based information submitted to them depends on a kind of collaborative voting by the sites’ members and ranking figured out by some sort of complex algorithm buried in the code behind the scenes. 

Are the many smarter than the individual, as far as web information filtering goes? The original Cool Tools article seemed to be nodding yes, but Jaron Lanier points out some very thoughtful objections to the view in DIGITAL MAOISM:The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.

I read Lanier’s theme as something like the collective isn’t always better, and in fact can be given to being pretty foolish — at least when it takes information out of the context of provided by smart (or not so smart) individuals.

• What makes a market work, for instance, is the marriage of collective and individual intelligence. A marketplace can’t exist only on the basis of having prices determined by competition. It also needs entrepreneurs to come up with the products that are competing in the first place.

There’s much to recommend spending some time with Lanier’s essay. Of course, that’s just my individual recommendation.