A resurgance once again in the local press about the wisdom, or lack of it, in crowds.  I’ve posted here about this a little, and that was added to very eloquently by Chris Saad of Particle who pointed out that media is additive.  There is place for both wise crowds and smart people. So what more to add to the debate? Well I was sufficiently impressed by the differences and the power of both Google Streets and Microsoft Lives Photo Synth to want to contrast them here in this context.

What’s interesting about this when it comes to the Crowds Vs. Expert debate is that both do a similar thing — street level perspectives of our world, yet they tackle the problem in different ways.

Googles view of the world in Google Streets is high quality, “expert” imagery taken presumably from a car with a special camera and then stitched together. 

Microsofts PhotoSynth uses Flickr (or presumably any photo source with a sufficiently high level of detail) to locate photos as “points” in space, pulling the wisdom of crowds to give us a point by point overview of the object in question.

Both give a very different view of the world.  Googles is a seamless experience, where you can browse from one end of the street to the other, rotate and view in any direction.  Microsofts points give an eerie overview of the object, with detail highlighted where it’s of interest and gaps where there is nothing that is worthy.

Both are amazing pieces of technology, regardless of their respective perspectives on the world.

Ultimately the power of the new web is the power of information - with Google Streets, users will be able to not only tag their favourite restauraunt, but also show a picture of its front door.  Photosynth enables a virtual tour of buildings and places and provides context to endless Flickr photos, not just on a map, but in space as well.

Crowds and experts live will together in the new world and more fool the journalist who tries to seperate the two.  To paraphrase Chris once more, the long tail of information means that there are consumers for all views of the world.

As Elias pointed out on my last post, evidence of the semantic web is emerging all around us.

I’ve mentioned Spock a couple of times, if you’re not familiar it’s a new “people” based search which crawls web-sites and social networking site to build a comprehensive picture of people.  If you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth a look.

I recently wanted to get back in touch with an old friend who had moved and whose details I’d misplaced.  The white pages were no help — over 100 matches in N.S.W alone.  Spock on the other hand lead me straight to her linked in profile and there was sufficient information their to ascertain that she was exactly the person I was after.

It lead me to two conclusions:

1. Spock is getting it right — it was the location that helped me find the person I was after.
2. There are still a heck of a lot of people (100+ in one state for one name match alone) who still have no profile on the Internet.

I’ve been travelling for work a lot over the last four weeks which has limited my time to blog, but I’ve had plenty of time to read magazines.  Wired is a great travel companion, with a good balance between fun, entertainment and something to think about.

One article I loved recently and well worth the time to read is this one about Louis Von Ahn, the inventor of Captcha’s (according to Wired) and his quest to put your spare time to work.  His “reCapthca’s” are helping the Internet Archives digitising project, by using you and I to decipher phrases computers can’t understand.

This is innovation at it’s leading edge — re-purposing tools to provide greater and greater benefit.  How many cycles of unused time do we generate that could be turned to useful purpose?