In praise of Wikinomics

If you haven't seen it yet, I'd highly recommend Wikinomics. You could easily spend several quality hours -- or days -- surfing through the massive amount of thought-provoking information there.

One excellent post on Wikinomics last week has the somewhat intimidating title HP Social Computing Lab: the Long Tail of Office Conversations. From the post:

It’s amazing how much great, free research is available on the web these days - if you can find it. One place a lot of people might not know about is the HP Social Computing Lab, which “focuses on methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of groups of people in order to realize greater value from the interaction between users and information.” It appears they have a team of about 14 researchers, led by Senior Fellow Bernardo A. Huberman, and they publish a couple of papers a month on the topic.

One of the papers I found most interesting lately was Revealing the Long Tail of Office Conversations, by Michael J. Brzozowski & Sarita Yardi. What the authors were interested in exploring tied was how social media tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) could breakdown geographic distances, work group boundaries, and organizational hierarchy in the organization. More importantly, they wanted to look at what motivated individuals to “invest their own time in creating content for public consumption.”

As the Wiki Community Manager for one of our company's divisions, I'm extremely interested in our ability to sift through, aggregate, interpret and otherwise learn from the wiki pages, conversations, etc. my peers post. It's a task HP calls "harvesting the collective intelligence of people," and maybe it's also what we've come to call the wisdom of the crowds. (Not "every data point from the crowds," or "every off-the-cuff comment of the crowds" -- but the wisdom of the crowds.) I'm in search of the ultra-concentrated intellectual efforts by our team -- from that expanding universe of "motivated individuals" -- that can give life to new product ideas, discover new ways to streamline existing processes and ultimately identify new ways to grow revenues and increase profits.

The HP paper also highlights the psychology of wikis: that is, what motivates individuals within the 'wiki web' to contribute to enriching it. That's key for us, since we have nearly 100 registered wiki users but not too many active contributors (yet). I'll have to make a cup of tea, then sit down and ponder this paper some more. Good stuff.