This is a great idea. The people at Pearson Publishing Group PLC, a large British publishing company, are publishing a business book about consumer-generated media, word-of-mouth marketing, social networks and online communities that will be authored by smart folks from MIT, Wharton and thousands of other business thinkers from around the world. Here’s the twist: The publisher is using a wiki, the same online multi-author system we all know best from Wikipedia, to create the book. Take a look at www.wearesmarter.org. You can join the crowd and be a co-author of this groundbreaking book by adding your thoughts and expertise to the wiki; but don’t start spending any future royalty checks. Web 2.0 doesn’t work that way.

This is a perfect demonstration of the idea that groups of people are smarter than even the smartest individuals. An idea brilliantly argued in James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds.” (This is a really great book even though it was written by only one guy.)

Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing. The web can aggregate a lot of individual contributions that are, by themselves, not particularly valuable and package them into things that are very valuable -- $1.5 billion Youtube also comes to mind. That was a good idea too.

-Jeff