Weekend links

What I've been reading over the weekend:

• Grand Rapids indie media outlet, Media Mouse, offers a roundup of alternative thought on the Ford presidency in Independent Press offers Alternative Views of President Gerald R. Ford: "As more media filters into Grand Rapids to cover Ford's Michigan funeral and his burial, there has still yet to be any critical examination of Ford's policies in the local media or in the national press."

• Media Mouse also thoroughly probes CD03 Rep. Vern Ehlers's record to tell a more complete story behind the recent GR Press article, "Ehlers voices second thoughts on war":
  "... the way in which the article ends is misleading and portrays Ehlers as a reluctant supporter of the war when in fact he supported it early on and has continued to support the war by voting for every military spending bill. Ehlers has also refused to support a timetable for the withdrawal of United States troops from Iraq and voted in support of the Military Commissions Act of 2006."

• Fellow MI blogger Christine Barry, who blogs Shiawassee County, has been getting some press notice recently. Way to go, Christine!
  

• Dave Pollard is thinking about good intranet and extranet design. Seems to me that most of this holds true for any site design. Good things to think about for the DU public site redesign my team is working on.

• "The Dumbness of Crowds" explores how New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki's "Wisdom of the Crowds" idea (his book has the same name) sometimes gets twisted. The Crowd is ... "a collection of individuals," says Kathy Sierra, "Individuals whose independent knowledge (and "independent" is a key word in what makes the crowd "smart") is aggregated in some way, not smushed into one amorphous Consensus Result." It is "collective intelligence."
  
  The idea of "Crowds" in this context "... was never meant to mean 'mobs,' 'groups acting as one,' 'committees,' 'consensus' or even 'high collaboration.'" A good example of the difference:

"Collective Intelligence" is about getting input and ideas from many different people and perspectives.

"Dumbness of Crowds" is blindly averaging the input of many different people, and expecting a breakthrough. (It's not always the averaging that's the problem it's the blindly part)