Swarm Creativity Blog

Thank to Bill Ives for pointing me to this New York Times article about Peter Jackson leveraging his fans using the Web in his negotiations with New Line Cinema. Because New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson could not agree on Jackson’s share on “Lord of the Ring” revenues, New Line Cinema intends to dump Peter Jackson as director of LOTR prequel “The Hobbit”. Peter Jackson’s letter on his fan web site theonering.net led to an uproar and letter writing campaign of his fans to New Line Cinema. The article got me to run a coolhunting query about the strength of Peter Jackson’s position in his negotiations with New Line Cinema as reflected on the Web. The picture below shows what I got. The first thing we notice is the strong position of theonering.net as the leading player and king maker among LOTR fans. The second is how strong the association between Peter Jackson and “The Hobbit” is, the combined query having by far the highest betweenness, much higher that the single queries for ...

Thanks to Ken Zolot for pointing me to this post by Henry Jenkins on "Collective Intelligence vs the Wisdom of Crowds" . Henry Jenkins rightly differentiates between the wisdom of crowds such as in prediction markets, and a more sophisticated way of working together through collective intelligence such as in Wikipedia, where people instantly get access to and can build upon each other's knowledge. In particular he talks about tapping into the wisdom of crowds through using online computer games to predict and make complex decisions. I think using multiplayer online computer games to predict and analyze the real world is a great idea. If this idea is taken seriously, developers of such predictive games might find our research results of interest, where we correlated social networking structures of gamers with their success in the game. What we found was that differently from the real world, the most successful gamers were the ones with the highest degree of connectivity,...