I’m sort of ambivalent about the whole “Wisdom of Crowds” concept, wherein some task or other such thing is handed over to a reasonably organized community of potential strangers for completion. One the one hand, we’ve seen such communities work well at filtering news, tagging images and sharing bookmarks. At the same time, there’s a lot of dreck in each of these places and the ultimate “wisdom of the crowds” experiment - open source software - can be a bit of a crapshoot.

Never the less, I love the concept and have a number of ideas that I’d love to turn to this way of doing things if I only had the time. Fortunately, another company is filling the void. Cambrian House is an experiment in what they call “crowd sourcing”. That is, they draw on the power of the crowd to develope software. And it’s a top-down community play - anyone can submit an idea, the community can vote on it, anyone can contribute in any myriad of ways (from code to concept to content to design) and, if it makes money, everyone profits, Such profits are doled out based on a point system, which is kind of odd and arbitrary, but it does seem to reflect each person’s contribution.

Curious to see how this whole thing will play out, I submitted my own idea to see where it got me. Basically, I envision an online system where folks selling items out of their own home - whether through eBay or an e-commerce site - can easily keep track of their inventory in real time the same way the big stores do, by using barcodes tied into their online databases and accounting software. Host it as an ASP, charge a monthly fee and you’ve got the beginnings of an online business suite. It could potentially be expanded to handle accounting functions, marketing campaigns and even provide another venue for folks to sell their wares. It’s been kicking in my head for about a year now, but I’ve been focusing on other ideas. Perhaps the crowd can make something of it and I’ll still be able to profit from it.