On the Wisdom of Crowds

This is seriously obsessive: heartonastick charted all the top 10 votes in various MP3 blogs (there's even an Excel spreadsheet to download) and concluded that, unsurprisingly in a world dominated by the indie kids, the top 3 albums of last year were Sufjan Stevens' Illinois, the Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary, and Bloc Party's Silent Alarm.

Of course, all ideas on the wisdom of crowds don't work if the crowd starts to engage too much with each other, creating some sort of groupthink... after all, the British Psychological Society points out research that seems to confirm that group brainstorming doesn't work.

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