Jeremiah Owyang, from the blog Web Strategy by Jeremiah, has a list of reasons why social media and the wisdom of crowds doesn’t work.

1. Opinions vs Facts and Analysis
2. Amateurs provide crappy content
3. Identity
4. Google rewards those that are popular and interesting
5. Crowds are not very wise
6. Socialism doesn’t work
7. Noise vs Signal

I don’t necessarily agree with all of these points. I think he doesn’t understand that the way the wisdom of crowds idea works is if you have a large number of independent individuals that are in general not aware of the results of any other individuals in the crowd. As soon as each individual in the crowd knows the outcome of everyone else in the crowd everything becomes skewed. A prime example of this is Digg. An article becomes popular because everyone I know is voting for it, not because it is accurate or I believe it is great information.

One item we do have in common is about search engines. Goggle’s search algorithm works on relevance and popularity. Unfortunately this becomes the Digg problem all over again. I think a better idea, if they can make it work, is human powered search engine called Mahalo. The idea is that you will get more relevant results from someone that has actually looked at the links and can provide some context.

This could all be changed by natural language search. So keep on the lookout.