Harnessing the collective wisdom of the crowd always sounds so good in theory, but few do it really well. More important, few have figured out the best ways to do it inside the walls of a corporation. I was surprised a couple weeks ago when the head of our HR department forwarded a job description to several of us to help her fill: It was for a company-wide Wiki manager -- not the "manager" role that makes it run and administers it, but the kind that evangelizes it, gets people to use it, and finds interesting threads and knowledge developing from it. I hope this is a new trend in corporate intelligence mining. On a related note, I talked to Paul Plushckell, CEO of Spigit, a company creating some interesting social network tools for the businesses.

Spigit was a Best of Interop winner in the software category, and what I found most interesting was that it goes beyond the very powerful, but somewhat limited capability of having people simply vote on or comment on something. Instead, it starts to take in concepts like the role of a member, or the influence that member has. In other words, it builds reputation based on the influence people have, rather than on how loud they are or frequency of contribution (useful metrics, but not always). For the corporate knowledge space, this could really be a powerful way to capture and harness intellectual capital.