In his article about “The Wisdom of Community” Derek Powazek discusses many topics related to a very important concept of the web as of today. He covers simplicity, interface, aggregation, participation, just to name a few, and is definetly worth reading.

Especially this quote is interesting to me:

The Wisdom of Crowds (WOC) theory does not mean that people are smart in groups—they’re not.

As he explains, WOC works best if the participation is very few and there is no discussion going on.

Conversational inputs are too complex for Wisdom of Crowds systems. Online discussion systems do not lead to wisdom on their own.

In other words, a crowd of widsoms doesn’t work. They don’t work because everyone part of the discussion is usually interessted in getting his own idea out, may not have complete knowledge of the problem, or it’s just hard to have a complete view of a discussion where opinions are often shared. Or, participants discuss opinions with each other and miss the importance to get back to the problem.

Instead of a crowd of wisdoms I’d prefer to have just a few experts that will understand my problem and provide me with a set of solutions and a recommendation. In addition I’d like to have someone to discuss with me and not with some other folks.

So, if you can’t use the wisdom of the crowds as descibed in Derek Powazeks article, better stick to experts instead of a crowd of wisdoms.

Chicago based 37signals just launched Highrise, an online shared contact manager. It looks quite similar to their existing and successful applications, Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire and completes the “suite” of easy to use personal and business web applications.

Unlike Google or many others, 37signals does not try to replace currently existing desktop applications, such as Word, with a web version (Word will be around for some more years, so competing against is really hard and maybe even sensless). Instead, they create products that solve problems better than many others by making it just simple, easy and a pleasure to use.

Since Highrise is out just a few hours ago, I won’t give any detailed review yet. However, one feature I already like. Adding categories to tasks:

This makes the task list a lot easier to view. Also, look at the grouping in GTD style.

A friend told me yesterday about a new blog tool on the web – SixAparts Vox.com. First I was not suprised, but after a while I was completely exited.

So what is different with vox.com. It has one feature I always missed and that was for many people a reason to not have a blog – privacy control. It lets you decide who can read your post. Whether it’s the whole world, your friends or your family. Now you can decide who can read your posts and view your photos.

Why is that so important? Many people use their weblogs to communicate with friends and so on. However, weblogs can be read by the whole world. This is not how it should be – only your friends should be able to read it. So, many people switched back to good old email and sent an email to all their friends. Sometimes with very long text and images. Now, you can manage to do that with a blog tool and still get the privacy you had with email.

Another aspect is, that a new way to communicate will emerge. Lets look at an email conversation with 4 people. You write the first one to 3 of your friends, and all 3 reply to your first one. So, how do you integrate their comments in your email to all 4 again. Actually you can’t do that very well and even more, if those 4 reply to all 4 participants, it doesn’t get better. I am sure you had that experience.

I already used Basecamp to communicate with more than one person in an email like way and it was a lot easier than with email. Everybody sees each others comment and will react on this comment. Also, you can view the conversation more easily.

Now with vox.com you can start conversations, not just blog posts, with others using your blog tool and don’t have to use email anymore. Sure, there are still uses for email but this opens up a whole new world.

Today, I was part of a very special moment. The company I work for, Neue Digitale, was bought by Avenue A | Razorfish. Although I am not fully into the online marketing business I really appreciate this move. If you want to get more information read the press release.

The integration into AARZ will take some time, for sure. Things like that are never easy neither on the technology side nor on the people side. The technological changes can be overcome just by working it out. Getting the people together might be a harder issue. However, since the two companies share attitudes, ways of working and a strive for quality this may help becoming a global company a lot faster.

Has anyone seen Bill Gates at reboot8? Or maybe Steve Ballmer? Most people would wish they would never be there but somehow they know about this conference. See for yourself what they did