The Wisdom of Community

It’s one of the most important concepts on the web today—perhaps the most important for social media—but it’s one of the least understood. When James Surowiecki wrote The Wisdom of Crowds in 2004, he explored the stock market and other classic social psychology examples, but “web 2.0” was still nascent. It’s time to connect his ideas to the social web, where they can reach their full potential.

The Wisdom of Crowds (WOC) theory does not mean that people are smart in groups—they’re not. Anyone who’s seen an angry mob knows it. But crowds, presented with the right challenge and the right interface, can be wise. When it works, the crowd is wiser, in fact, than any single participant.

The standard example is this: Imagine you have a jar of pennies. Ask a few hundred people how many there are inside. When you tally the results, chances are, all the guesses will be wrong. But if you average all the answers, the result will be almost perfect, almost all the time.

The web, with its low barrier to entry and permeable social boundaries, is the ultimate medium through which to explore the finer points of the wisdom of crowds. You’re surrounded by online examples: Google’s search results. BitTorrent. The “Most E-mailed” stories on your favorite news site. Each is powered by wisdom gleaned from crowds online.

You need a few things to enable online crowds to be wise.

Simplicity

In the penny jar example, you ask each participant for a number. Google didn’t ask anyone anything to create their search results, though they just intuited the importance of every page in their index by considering how often it was linked to.

Note that in each case mentioned above—Google, BitTorrent, “Most E-mailed” lists, and the penny jar—the inputs are not conversational. Conversational inputs are too complex for Wisdom of Crowds systems. Online discussion systems do not lead to wisdom on their own.

The simplicity of the individual task is also important. Systems based on the Wisdom of Crowds can tackle surprisingly complicated projects, but each project must first be broken down to its simplest possible components.

Interface

Complicated interfaces can be great for complicated tasks, but not for WOC systems. The more complicated the interface is, the less participation you can expect, and the more muddled that participation will be. Soliciting WOC feedback is about tapping the zeitgeist. Don’t make participants think too much.

WOC interfaces are often voting mechanisms that use a spectrum or a thumbs up/down system, but they could just as easily involve selecting a point on a map or drawing a shape.

Aggregation

One of the reasons discussions do not lead to wise results is that there’s no aggregation—the conversation just happens. But WOC systems are there to produce a result. This requires an aggregator (like you) and an algorithm.

In the penny jar example, the aggregator is the person tallying the guesses, and the algorithm is a simple median. With Google’s search results, Google is the aggregator, their algorithm is called PageRank, and it’s a constantly evolving, closely guarded secret.

Participation

A defining element of any WOC system is that the more participants it has, the better it gets. Discussion systems and chat rooms fall apart when too many voices get involved. If your community feature gets worse the more people use it, it’s not a WOC system.

For a crowd to truly be wise, it also has to be diverse. The Wisdom of Crowds works because the people on the edges balance each other out. Recruit too many people on one side of any spectrum and your results will suffer.

Selfishness

It’s counter-intuitive, but the wisest crowds are the ones made up of individuals who are thinking about their own needs, not the needs of the group. In the stock market, the participants are all motivated to buy low and sell high. Yet the markets are usually wise about finding the value of a company. Each person is thinking about their bottom line, not the health of the company or the market, but it works.

Similarly, website creators were not consciously voting for certain sites to be highly ranked, but the collective linking decisions did produce wise results. Nowadays, link spammers do try to manipulate Google’s results, which is akin to stock manipulation. Both practices are fought by the institutions that depend on unmanipulated results.

Selfishness also fights a larger problem. Group-think is when the members of a group put the group’s needs above their own. As soon as this happens, the group is in danger. The stock market collapse, the NASA Challenger disaster, and many other examples can be attributed to group-think.

In the penny jar example, participants were told that the correct guesser would win all the money. Their participation was entirely selfish — they wanted to win the money. The fact that their participation could be averaged to create an answer is just a fortunate byproduct.

Designing for selfishness does not necessarily mean paying cash prizes. A news site with a Most E-mailed Stories box that displays the stories that have been e-mailed to people doesn’t have to pay anyone to pick their favorite stories—the information is easily gleaned from server logs. The key factor is the user’s motivation for participating: They’re doing it for their own personal reasons (“Heather would love this story!”). They’re not consciously voting for the story—the vote is a byproduct.

This method should be contrasted with news voting sites like Digg, where users do explicitly vote for top stories. As a result, these sites face a constant battle against people trying to game the system. Indeed whole businesses have sprung up in order to place a link on the highly trafficked Digg homepage.

Scores

Keeping score is part of any game, and any website with community input is going to be used as a game. So think very carefully before assigning your participants a score for their participation.

For example, Slashdot had an internal “karma” score that it assigned to every member based on their participation. The system then used that score to determine certain features (like the ability to moderate other users’ comments and their default comment score).

That’s all fine. But then they disclosed the user’s score to them. The moment they did that, they invented “karma whores”—users who post comments they know will be rated highly by the community, creating a unique kind of group-think.

Games are fine, so long as the goal of the gamer benefits the site. But Slashdot’s games either promoted group-think (by agreeing) or trolling (by disagreeing). Both probably existed before the scores, but disclosing the scores certainly fueled them.

Leaderboards

Leaderboards create a problem for Wisdom of Crowds systems. On the one hand, a well-tuned WOC system can create an excellent leaderboard. Feedback from users is collected, the algorithm scores the content, and the result is a list of items in a fairly accurate good-to-bad order (think Google results).

And there’s the rub: Disclosing the ranked list to the community amplifies group-think. The highly rated items get even more highly rated, the low rated items fall off the radar. Showing the list destroys its accuracy.

So what to do? Here are a few suggestions:

• Go in phases. Allow voting for a set period of time. When that time is up, close voting and display results. Threadless does this for its design submissions.
• Mix it up. Instead of showing a ranked list (aka leaderboard), show a selection that includes highly rated items in a random order. This is what Flickr does with it’s “interestingness” view.
• Make users earn disclosure. Show the voice of the community only after your vote has been cast. This is what many online polling systems do to avoid letting the current tally influence the voters.
• Use an algorithm. When you have to show a current, or a ranked list, use a recipe that takes lots of data into account, in addition to votes. This is what Google does with its search results. It’s also why they have to constantly tweak the results in an ongoing arms race with people who try to figure out their system.

How you display the wisdom of your crowd can be as important as how you ask for it in the first place. It can be tempting to just put up a ranked list, but in most cases doing so will harm the very wisdom you’re trying to glean.

Explicit vs. implicit feedback

In many of the examples I’ve used, wisdom is gleaned from user behavior. In these cases, the feedback is implicit. In other cases we ask users outright for feedback, as in voting systems. That’s explicit. Whether you use explicit or implicit feedback, or some combination of the two, is an important decision in designing any WOC system.

In working on your own WOC systems, pay attention to when you can glean implicit feedback without having to ask for it directly. Implicit feedback is usually more honest and less prone to gaming. There are also ways to mix the two, for example, asking for explicit voting, but comparing it to implicit data (such as page views, comments, or other recordable user actions).

Voting

This sounds undemocratic, but voting does not have to rule all in WOC systems. In many cases, it shouldn’t.

Just because you’re collecting votes doesn’t mean you have to crown the item with the most votes the winner. You could just as easily look for items that are controversial (high percentage of both good and bad votes) or are undiscovered (low number of total votes).

And remember that not all votes have to be equal. Votes from “good” members (however you determine good) can have a higher impact.

Studies show that when rating a series of items, users are more likely to vote bad in succession. In other words, once you start voting bad, you’re more likely to keep voting bad. So it would be fair to count a bad vote less if it comes after another bad vote by that user. Or just keep the length of time in that voting session as a variable, and see what happens when you alter how you weigh early votes vs late ones. If someone’s been voting for an hour, does that make them more valuable or less? Experiment to find out.

Wiser together than we would be alone

These aspects of the Wisdom of Crowds are just the start — there’s a lot more to learn. Be sure to pick up Surowiecki’s book. And remember, WOC systems must evolve: you’re never done. But done right, they can change the way we live online, and maybe make us all a little wiser.

• Illustration by Kevin Cornell
• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-wisdom-of-community/
  

Staying Motivated

Maintaining Motivation

Whether your chosen medium is pictures or language, food or formulas, everyone has the capacity to be creative in their work. But we can often lose our motivation to create, making it difficult to stay focused and excited on a project. So how does one keep their creative well from drying up?

Maintaining your motivation to create is actually a long-term endeavor. Starting out can be tough, but with discipline and consistency you will eventually reach a point where staying motivated only requires minimal daily maintenance—a simple matter of learning to make the right choices at the right time.

Of course, everyone is different, and each person will have their own unique formula to propel themselves into a creative frenzy. So while this article offers some possible solutions, it is up to you to make the right choices to keep yourself motivated. Maintaining motivation requires paying attention to your behavior, listening to your instincts, and learning how to encourage, bargain, and even trick yourself into being creative.
Phase I: starting out

As I’ve mentioned, starting from scratch is the hardest part, and rewards don’t come quick. But if you want to reach a point where all you need to do is give your motivation occasional maintenance, you have to start somewhere.

Here’s a few tips to help you when you’re starting out:
Set goals

It’s a lot easier to stay motivated when you feel like you’ve accomplished something, but how can you know when you succeed if you never set a goal? Give yourself something to achieve.
Stack the deck

Keeping interested and motivated is directly related to those successfully met goals. Set yourself up for more success than failure by being realistic in your goal setting. Small, bite-sized tasks at first. As you get more and more successes under your belt, make your goals more ambitious.
Build a creative den

Whether it’s your desk area, a dark cave, a hotel room, or a home office, you need a place specifically set aside to be creative in. Once you’ve decided on that place, use it like the dickens. Each creative success you have in that location will train your mind to be creative within its boundaries. When I set foot inside my office, something clicks on in my brain, and I’m ready to work. Sure, it took about six months to turn into a den—but trust me, it’s time and effort well spent.
Retreat, but don’t surrender

Never give up on projects or problems. Put them aside for a while, but always come back to solve them (even if it’s only developing a theory for solving them). Solving these problems will build your confidence, your knowledge, and (hopefully) your portfolio.
Find your cycle

Just as your body has optimal times for sleeping and eating, there’s also an optimal time when your body is at its most creative (and, unfortunately, least creative). For me, that super-creative time is in the morning. I know many other people find that they’re most creative late at night. Find out when you’re at your creative best, and start using that time to your advantage; save your least creative time to do the mundane administrative aspects of your job.
The right tools

Being creative is difficult enough; don’t make it harder for yourself by using inferior (or just plain wrong) tools. Explore your options and find the tools that allow you to create what you want to create, and get the best ones you can afford.
Follow your progress

Seeing just how far you’ve come can be an excellent motivational tool. If you don’t stop every so often to see where you were a couple months ago, and where you are now, do it—you might surprise yourself with how much you’ve gotten done, or how much you’ve creatively grown. Or perhaps you’ll feel you didn’t get enough done, and it will strengthen your resolve to work harder. Whatever the case, it’s worth it to check every once in a while.
Phase II: maintenance

Applying the tips from above, you’ll hopefully reach a point where you’re consistently motivated. Yet even when you’ve reached this plateau, you will occasionally hit points where that fervor wanes. It’s in those instances when you’ll need to try something new or different, set obstacles, or even take a step backwards in order to get your motivation back.

Here’s some things to try when you feel like you’ve hit a rut:
Don’t set any goals

In the early stages of an idea, or if you’ve stumbled upon a creative endeavor you wish to experiment with, setting goals may destroy some of the spontaneity that makes experimentation so fulfilling. Let things play out naturally, and when you’re ready you’ll know if it’s time to duct tape that idea to a timeline.
Make the goals unrealistic

I believe in certain instances that biting off more than I could chew worked out to my advantage. It helped me focus on the project, and push myself farther than I would normally. Unfortunately, you run the risk of failing to complete those goals, or completing them and completely burning out.
Get out of the house

While a creative den can often get the juices flowing, sometimes it helps to go somewhere different to work. It may not be as familiar and comfortable as your creative den, but it can provide different stimuli that can positively influence your ideas, and eventually your work.
Study your peers

It can be helpful to see what others in your industry are doing. It may provide inspiration, and at the very least will give you an idea of what the standards are for excellence in your particular industry (which can help you figure out what to expect of yourself).
Ignore your peers

While it has its benefits, studying your peers too much can often cause you to focus only on their achievements, and lose focus on your own goals. What’s worse, it can often cause you to doubt your own work if it’s too different from the industry standard. When in fact you might be working on something just so different and fresh that it’s what the industry needs. Have a care, and don’t lose focus on your own work.
Seek external stimulation

We’re absolutely surrounded by the creative output of both human beings and nature. Taking a closer look at everything around you can spark new ideas, and give you insight into how to solve some of your own creative problems. Whether it’s a museum, the center of town, or the biggest damn waterfall you’ve ever seen, there might be something out there to push you back into a creative mode.
Seek internal stimulation

While surrounding yourself with stimuli can be helpful, it’s often just as helpful to remove all external stimuli, and let your brain stimulate itself. For example, I often go running to help give me ideas. Not because I like running, but because it’s possibly the most boring activity in the world. It’s often easier for me to mull over creative problems when there’s nothing for my brain to do.
Keep a sketchbook or notebook

I can’t emphasize this one enough. Ideas—good or bad—need to be recorded. No one can remember them all. Writing down an idea for long-term storage might just free up some room in your brain to tackle new problems. What’s more, you now have a library of ideas to lend a hand when a deadline is looming and you’re not feeling your most creative.
Work through it

While it may seem counterintuitive to force yourself to be creative, often it can work out for the best. It might feel difficult and clumsy at the start, but as you gain momentum you’ll almost always find your motivation has returned. And if it hasn’t, then take comfort in this—sometimes you may feel the work you’re producing is the most horrid abomination the world has seen, you may be producing good work after all. You’re just in the wrong state of mind to tell. Get through things as best as you can—you won’t know whether it’s good or bad until later on.
Give yourself obstacles

Set a time limit, refuse to use a certain tool, make yourself take a more difficult direction—often these obstacles lead to some pretty exciting results.
Remove unnecessary obstacles

We sometimes set unnecessary limits on a project, which hinder our ability to solve the most important problem. If you feel you’re too restricted while trying to solve a creative problem, it can often help to reevaluate the restrictions, and see if some of the unimportant ones can’t be stripped away.
Get on your horse

So there you go. Hopefully, some of these suggestions can help you get on the right path to long-term motivation, or help you jumpstart your slightly-waning creative enthusiasm. As I mentioned above, these are by no means the only solutions. Only you can decide what direction is appropriate when. But with a little luck, experimentation, patience, and persistence, you’ll find the right regimen for keeping your motivation and creativity ever flowing.

* Illustration by Kevin Cornell
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/stayingmotivated/

5 Easy Steps to Staying Motivated

Motivating yourself to excel at your job or to be an example to your employees, should not be something you do only when the spirit moves you. It’s an ongoing process that should include every facet of your business life. This means your mental attitude, physical well-being and appearance, work atmosphere, your interaction with others (clients and employees alike), and your off-the-job environment.

Motivational experts get paid big bucks to tell professionals, striving for success, that they must constantly examine these factors. How do you do that? Follow the 5 tips that follow, and watch the changes.

1. Maintain a Positive Attitude – Let’s realize that life is only 10% of what happens to us and 90% how we react to it. We’re responsible for our own actions and attitudes, and changing them when appropriate. When you’re around people/things that are uplifting and positive, you feel that way. You have more confidence in yourself, and know you can change whatever needs changing. If you can make your workplace such a place you’ll find happier workers and higher production. You might even find your employees look forward to coming to work!

2. Leave Personal Troubles Home - Everyone has problems, but they don’t belong at work. Turn your attention and energy entirely to your on-the-job tasks. This will actually be good for you because you’ll get a mental break from your troubles.

3. Create Positive Affirmations - The reason for writing goals for your business is the same as creating positive affirmations on paper. What your eyes see and ears hear, your mind will believe. Try it! After you’ve written them down, read them aloud to yourself – and do it every morning when you get into work. You’ll be amazed at what happens. Come up with a set of new ones every month. Statements such as, “I’m an important and valuable person,” or “I know I’ll make good use of my time today.” Repeating them out loud everyday at a set time will help reinforce positive actions.

4. Make Sure Break Times Are Really Break Times - This is an area where most bosses/entrepreneurs fall down. You become so intense about the project or situation you’re working on that you don’t ease up. Thinking that it’ll be solved in the next few seconds, and then you’ll get a cup of coffee can lead you right up to quitting time. Regularly adhering to a specified break schedule, even if you’re the boss, releases the tension. If you work on a computer this is even a greater problem because before you realize it – you’ve been working in that same position for hours. The best answer to this is to set yourself a reminder on your appointment calendar for every 2 hours, and let the computer reminder chime send you the alert to move around.

5. Exercise, Exercise, Exercise - I know that lately it seems that “exercise” is the cure-all to every physical ailment or your love life, but despite that there is some truth to that ugly word. By “exercise” I don’t mean that you should go out and join a gym and spend your lunch-time, 3-days-a-week there working out. What is really beneficial and workable is that at those chiming alerts from your computer, get up and walk around your desk or room. Maybe go outside and get the mail and enjoy the sunlight (if you’re an entrepreneur that has a home office), or just Concentrated, tense thinking – typing - plotting plans - or whatever your work, makes all those muscles tighten up and knot up. Then when we move we “ooh” and “ouch” because we’ve knotted up into a ball of tension. Periodic stretching, even at our desk, or just getting up and walking over to the window and getting a different view can help get up and do a few stretches.

One of the greatest disservice modern business décor has done to us, is making our offices pristine, sleek, unencumbered spaces. There is nothing more relaxing than getting up from your desk and walking over to a peaceful, serene, seascape or pastoral painting and just drinking it in visually. Momentarily transporting your mind out of work and into that place does wonders. A few good paintings and less shiny chrome in offices would
benefit us all. It only takes a little concentrated effort on our part to keep motivated and productive, which leads to success. I know you’re going to hate hearing this, but it’s true anyway – and that is, “WHEN LIFE GIVES YOUR LEMONS – MAKE LEMONADE!".

http://www.articles888.com/articles/14082/1/5-Easy-Steps-to-Staying-Motivated/Page1.html

The Law of Attraction & the Science of Getting Rich

What are you thinking about right now? The Law of Attraction states that "whatever we think about, we bring about". This law may initially seem like new age fluff but believe it or not, there are scientific merits to this proposition. The top quantum physicists of our time have discovered that our universe and our reality is very much directed by the "observer".

When studying quantum particles (the smallest observable unit of matter), these scientists discovered that such particles behave in accordance with the person conducting the experiment. It the scientists "predict" that quantum particles behave in a certain way, they do. And yet, if the scientists "predict" that quantum particles behave in another way, they do. It is the "observer" that dictates the outcome of the experiment!

What does all this mean for us normal people? Well actually, these scientific experiments has far reaching implications for us as our world is made up of these same quantum particles! In this case, we are the "observer" the director and hence the creator of our reality, our world and our experience.

So, be careful of what you think about! for example, have you thoughts ever begun with the following phrases:

- I don’t understand

- I don't want...

- I’m frustrated that

- I hate my

- I can’t figure out

- I’m stressed about

- I’m worried that

- I should be able to but I can’t

Why am I having so much trouble?

The Law of Attraction indifferent to the words preceding your thought. Whatever you think about you will attract into your life. When you think "I don't understand why bad things always happen to me?", you are "attracting" bad things into your life. When you think "I want to get out of debt", you are attracting more debt into your life. When you think "I'm worried I will get sick", you are attracting sickness into your life! The Law of Attraction brings about what you focus on even if it is not what you want. Get it?

If you understand this principle, here are some examples of how to make the law of attraction work to support you rather than to act against you.

Try observing your thoughts and changing your thinking in the following way:

"I want to get out of debt" to "I want to earn amazing riches"
"I hate my boss" to "I look forward to owning my own business
"I don't understand why he is so lazy" to "I love it when he helps out around the house"

"I'm stressed about this project" to "I always create amazing results in my projects"

"I'm worried about getting sick" to "I experience vibrant health daily"

Now that we have a better understanding of the Law of Attraction, it is no surprise why so many people struggle with regards to money. It is been said that "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer". This is actually the Law of Attraction in action. Because the wealthy have money, they often think about how to best use their money and hence they attract more money. The poor on the other hand often think about their present lack of money and unfortunately, that also attracts lack into their lives. Currently, 96% of the world's wealth is being earned by just 1% of the population!

To address this issue, the main teachers behind the movie is launching a program is called "The Science of Getting Rich" and it is based on employing the law of attraction to create wealth. This amazing program is based on the principles and philosophies outlined in a book of the same title written in 1910 by Wallace D Wattles. This is the same book that inspired the movie.

What is the Science of Getting Rich about? Well in the words of Wallace D. Wattles, "The ownership of money and property comes as a result of doing things in a certain way. Those who do things in this certain way, whether on purpose or accidentally, get rich. Those who do not do things in this certain way, no matter how hard they work or how able they are, remain poor. It is a natural law that like causes always produce like effects. Therefore, any man or woman who learns to do things in this certain way will infallibly get rich." The Science of Getting Rich Seminar is all about teaching how to do things in this "certain" way to create wealth.
http://www.articles888.com/articles/14083/1/The-Law-of-Attraction--the-Science-of-Getting-Rich/Page1.html