Are we really smarter than me?

Are you a member of the elite? You're about to find out. Starting this week Pearson Education (whose own website is strangely silent on the subject) is sending messages to more than a million business professionals and scholars "inviting them to collectively write
and edit a book, tentatively titled We Are Smarter Than Me."

The initiative started in October when the blogosphere was cranked up to talk about it. The idea is that all these contributors would bang their ideas into a wiki and this would be turned into a book on "how Web 2.0 technologies such as social networks,
wikis and blogs can benefit the business enterprise."

It's to be published in the Autumn of 2007. Hohoho. Be easier to nip over to O'Reilly and download its Web 2.0 report then spend the next year making things happen at your workplace.

This looks like a horrible clash of the old and the new. Old publishing with its long lead-times and new media which just gets on with it. But, hey, it's all being done in a wiki, so that makes it okay.

The premise of the book, according to the publisher, comes from James Surowiecki's 2005 book, The Wisdom of Crowds. In it, claims Pearson, he "explored the idea that large groups of people working together can be “smarter” than an elite few".

Hmmm. I'm not sure that's what he claimed. I thought it was that the crowd could be smarter than the elite few. The phrase "working together" rather spoils things. The whole point of a crowd's smartness is that it is the aggregate of the differing views that delivers a result. Consensus - implied by "working together" - will deliver mush. The penny dropped for Kathy Sierra when she listened to Surowiecki's own explanation.