Rating: 
Summary: Excellent exposee, but nothing really new
Review: Surowiecki has collected a formidable ensemble of exhibits to prove that crowds make better decisions than even smart individuals (subject to certain conditions, like diversity of people in the group and their independence, and the right group size and working habits). His book is excellent, but the ideas have been presented elsewhere before. However, Surowiecki has put them together in an unexpected and wonderful way. Riots and stock market bubbles, Nielsen ratings and traffic jams, sunken submarines and virtues of short selling might not be expected to have much in common, but Surowiecki's expose makes them blend naturally.
If you have read both economics (e.g. Friedrich Hayek or Amos Tversky), statistical physics of order and chaos (e.g. by physicist Per Bak), decision and organization theory (e.g. James March and Herbert Simon), simulations (e.g. John Casti, Brian Arthur and others from Sante Fe Institute), emergence and links (e.g. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi), statistics, social psychology, risk theory and finance (e.g. Charles Kindleberger or George Soros), chances are that you will not find much anything really new. But how many of us have ?
One of the interesting conclusions is that most American corporations are wasting their money by paying top executives (and analysts) way too much. Surowiecki maybe didn't stress this too much, and left it as an exercise for the reader to convince herself that this is in fact the case.
There are references but they are not marked in the text (which I find good for popular science), instead the notes and bibliographic sources can be found at the back of the book referred to by page numbers, but unfortunately the page numbers are consistently wrong. Probably the British edition that I have was printed with different settings from the American edition, but no one at Little, Brown bothered to check the notes.
My final comment concerns the way bibliography is made: Linus Torvalds' book "Just for Fun" is listed but Surowiecki has most probably not read it, because he claims that Linus Torvalds is a Norwegian. If he had, he would have known that Linus is a Finn. This kind of bloating of references by including items that did not really contribute to the text should be avoided. And what is more, Surowiecki might have applied his own method: google in "Norwegian Linus Torvalds" and "Finnish Linus Torvalds" and you'll get 2 and 18 hits, respectively (or if you prefer, use Norway vs. Finland and you'll get something like 10 000 vs. 20 000). This shows that while James Surowiecki may be bright, he should not pretend to be brighter that the crowd.
Rating: 
Summary: Readable And Enlightening (although one-sided)
Review: Surowiecki's greatest strength in this book is his ability to break down what could possibly be difficult to understand (and sometimes counterintuitive) principles and make them easily understandable. This book was written for the general public (actually, I heard on NPR that he wrote it with his mother in mind, wanting to be able to explain these things to her) and he adopts a very casual tone with the reader making the subject of the book very nonthreatening. Not really sure how much practical application this would have for the business world but I did find this book interesting to read from the pop psychology standpoint-this book won't change your life but it will be a nice way to while away a winter afternoon.
The main misgiving I have after reading this book is that it did not come across as an honest investigation into these issues of `crowd wisdom' but rather it was almost exclusively focused on evidence that cast it in a positive light. I felt like Surowiecki was trying to see me something (well I guess he was trying to `sell' the theory.) While I think I would have enjoyed a more balanced view more that one-sidedness is not really a huge detractor from the book as long as you go into it being aware of that bias. Someone seeking a scholarly look at these topics would be better off looking elsewhere or better yet to read other books on the topic in addition to this one- just don't expect The Wisdom of Crowds to give you the complete picture.
But over all it is a well written and very approachable book with good insight to offer.
Rating: 
Summary: Not that great
Review: The author of this book is a real trickster. Crowds are great at developing solutions when they average their ideas. But even so, that is only true when errors are random and not systematic. Systematic errors, and group decision making often lead to worse responses.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant work that deserves thought
Review: The book is about the ability and strength of 'democratizing solutions', in many ways a positive evolutionary step in capitalism. In a free world you are missing precious opportunity by not valuing diverse perspectives when it comes to decision making. Surowiecki shows how we can benefit from the lack of shared information and opposing views to get better quality solutions. He also points out the danger in consensus and compromise when confronted with certain problems. It is a shame that various leaders haven't embraced this thinking - the results would be impressive.
This book brings the research into a readable and enjoyable form. We get both the concepts and real world examples to understand the principles.
Rating:
Summary: Why The Collective Wisdom of Crowds is Right (Sometimes)
Review: The interesting thesis of the book, if I understand correctly, is that sometimes the viewpoint of the crowd is better than the opinion of a sole, or a few experts.
For example, the scientist Galton observed, at a fair, that a group of people who guessed the weight of an ox were, when averaged, only 1 pound off from the actual weight of the ox.
Another example are prediction markets like the Foresight Exchange on the Internet. There was another prediction market, that, as time went on in 2000, had Bush defeating Gore; this prediction market turned out to be right, and some political scientists turned out to be incorrect.
In order for the crowd to give a pretty good opinion, there are four critieria that must be satified, according to the author: 1. diversity of opinion; 2. independence of members from one another; 3. decentraliation; 4. a good method for aggregating opinions.
But here I disagree--even with these four conditions fulfilled, the crowd does not always give the correct view. For example, I am a member of Internet discussion groups. I would say that all the four conditions are pretty well satisfied, but I have hardly seen a consensus develop in the first place--and even if it did, that would not make it true.
Going back to the above examples, what made the people at the fair to nearly guess correctly the weight of the ox, or for a prediction market to correctly predict the winner of the 2000 US Presidential election, is, in a word, incentives. The participants in those cases have a stake in being correct--they can win an ox, or win some sort of status in the Internet prediction market.
I think that it is a fair generalization to make that participants, when given incentives to be correct, do tend to be correct. This is interesting.
I wonder if this "market" epistemology can be further expanded--not just in correctly predicting the weight of an ox or a Presidential election, but to determine if a certain theory is true.
By no means do I hold that a theory is true by the number of its adherents. What I am getting at is something like this: Our colleges teach economics and medicine. If these colleges were teaching seriously wrong theories of economics and medicine, then their graduates would go out into the world and fail, and even harm others. So there is a critical feedback loop: there is an incentive for good economic and medical theories to be developed in the colleges. This may also explain why we see relatively little of the pernicious influence of "political correctness" in fields like economics and medicine, as compared to subjects in the humanities.
So the trick then is create structures where the participants have incentives to be right--in all areas.
Rating:
Summary: The masses can be much smarter than we give it credit.
Review: This is a very interesting book that covers many complicated subjects related to group decisions vs. individual decisions. It touches on Game theory, behavioral economics, and Decision theory. However, it is not a treaty in any of these areas. The author keeps his observations at a 10,000 feet high level. So, the book instead of being a dry tome for mathematicians is actually a very entertaining book for laypersons. The author touches on the many aspects where crowds provide superior judgments than individuals alone. Our civilization quietly depends on many such favorable situations, These include the capital markets in general, and the stock market in particular. But, it also includes Nielsen ratings, polls, voting records. Most of the time, in all these circumstances the many give a better assessment, valuation, or judgment than the individual. The author is quick to point out that this is not always the case. Markets experience stock market bubbles where the collective judgment becomes euphoric. However, year in year out and over decades, the stock market (representing the many) beats the majority of the investment pros hands down. The author is fascinated by the emergence of "decision markets," including the Iowa Electronic Markets for betting on Presidential election outcome that has proven more accurate than the polls. Another such example is the tradesports website that does the same, including betting on sport events, media events, international politics events. These are perfect examples where the many gather their judgment through trading values thanks to the Internet. In general, it is uncanny how accurate these decision markets are. There is really something to the saying "put your money where your mouth is." In a nutshell, this is a very interesting and thought provoking book. It promotes democratic and decentralized decision making within corporations and government institutions. This makes good sense. The CEO or the President just can't hold that much information in their individual brains anyway. Instead, why not rely a lot more extensively on the collective wisdom generated by the aggregated sum of our own individual brilliance. Why not!
Rating:
Summary: A great reading
Review: This is one of the finest books I have read. The author provides some interesting examples to substantiate the title of the book. I do not believe 100% in the theory and find it less applicable to critical areas like medical science where focussed expertise matters the most. I wonder whether 10 great surgeons looking into the pros and cons of a critical heart surgery would come out with a better solution or would the opinion of experts from diverse fields be better!...
Overall a pleasure reading.
Rating:
Summary: Essential reading
Review: This is one of the most entertaining and intellectually engaging books I've come across in a long while. Surowiecki has a gift for making complex ideas accessible, and he has a wonderful eye for the telling anecdote. His thesis about the intelligence of groups made up of diverse, independent decision-makers seems initially counterintuitive, but by the end of the book it seems almost obvious, because of all the evidence Surowiecki piles up on its behalf. The book does cover a lot of ground in not very much space, and the pace of the argument is at times too fast. But the throughline of the argument is almost always clear, and the stories Surowiecki tells are often memorable. The chapter on NASA's mismanagement of the Columbia mission and the tale of how a man named John Craven relied on collective wisdom to find a lost submarine are especially striking. This is one of those books that I expect people will still be talking about and referring to years or even decades from now. It's also a book that I hope will have a concrete impact on the way that people make decisions, since the implications of Surowiecki's argument are radical in the best way.
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