Wisdom of the crowds

Although it seems that the wisdom of the crowds is usually correct, that may not always be the case. I spent a few (bored) evenings as an online "volunteer"  to transcribe genealogical information for an online archive that was engaging in Crowdsourcing.  While it struck me as a great idea, mainly because I was interested personally in accessing some of the files that were being transcribed, I realized how erroneous this kind of crowdsourcing could be. I transcribed several files without reading the directions.  I submitted files with numerous mistakes mainly because I couldn't be bothered to read the directions. I'm not sure anyone was going to clean up after my mistakes either.

I have to admit that I suffer from information overload.  I don't read emails anymore because I subscribed to too many political and work-related email lists. I've tried to organize them into files in gmail, but have found it too overwhelming.  As a result, I miss important emails about school meetings etc. Strangely though on facebook, I'm always happy to read as much information as I can, and am willing to scroll forever reading posts from hours before.  I suppose that this is the "Fear of missing out," which is probably why my cellphone battery dies after a few hours of checking email and facebook.

I have noticed on facebook that most of my good friends (in real life) overlap with one another, although in some cases I know that they aren't really good friends with one another.  Usually when somebody who doesn't know anyone else that I know requests a friendship, I wonder what they want from me, or how do they even know me.  Unfortunately, my attempt to run netvizz in Facebook didn't work the way I thought it should, and just yielded names and numbers. So I tried WolframAlpha and I received a lot of information, some of it interesting, some not.  The most amusing was that Ahmad was the most common name among my friends.  And my friend Aviva will be very happy to hear that she was listed as a top "social connector."   I found this interesting too, when I log onto facebook, including at 3 am.

Unfortunately, I could not save this information as it requires a subscription!