American Idol

Here's my friend's unedited comment about the quotation below:

"...that since American Idol is the crowd favorite we are doomed by this.
It seems that things get averaged out in the end."

"The competition also validates the concept of collective intelligence
popularized in James Surowiecki's 2005 book The Wisdom of Crowds
(Anchor Books). He argues that the sum of many independent votes is
often superior to any one vote, even if made by the greatest expert.
For Netflix, the vast number of independent ratings allows for
surprisingly good predictions. The power of this collective
intelligence is also being harnessed in, for instance, Amazon.com's
product recommendations and the collaborative editing of the online
encyclopedia, Wikipedia. With the rise of social networks on the Web,
we can expect to see and contribute to even more powerful examples in
the coming years." (20 May 2009)

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may09/8788/3