NewRedBook – The Nick Garner Blog

I’ve been very interested in the whole human + connectivity, nature of the Internet and how it can be a great gatherer of collective application and a way for spreading ideas fast.

Te best book I know on collective consciousness and prediction outcome is probably the Wisdom of crowds. After about 1/2 way through the book, you get the main idea: People in a collective are very good at predicting outcome and being good judges.

This stuff is interesting and is written by Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams:
The Betfair Prof: “Question: How do you find a missing submarine? Answer: Ask the audience”
| Prediction Markets

On the theme of collective thinking, I work for a company called Betfair and we run a ‘stock exchange’ for individuals who bet either on the positive or negative outcome of a sports event. Betfair sits in the middle as a custodian (similar to escrow services) and takes a small commission.

OK, so you may ask – whats that to do with SEO ? well not a lot really, other than search engines are very good collectors of ‘zeitgeist’ (that’s a word for collective consciousness of the moment)

Google run such a service : http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends# And from this you can get a sense of the collective currents in human thinking. The yearly one is worth looking at

I don’t know what the outcome of this is, other than if you are picking up an an affiliate idea and you want to SEO for it, by understanding the collective ‘pick up’ on an idea you can get a handle on whether the project is a good bet.