The collective

Remember the dialogue - "we are the Borg, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated" (Star Terk - TNG). I think we are headed the way the Borg went - collective consciousness, decisions made via the collective thoughts of a group. Blogs, forums, cell phones are all headed that way. You join a blog, subscribe to a group and are influenced by the thoughts of the people there. Not all will subscribe to the thoughts but a small but significant amount of people will think alike and act accordingly. The collective mind set.

I took this off wikipedia

It defines what a collective would be, makes interesting reading:

While group and artificial intelligence have something to offer, collective intelligence is at its roots a human enterprise in which mind-sets, a willingness to share, and an openness to the value of distributed intelligence for the common good are paramount. Individuals who respect collective intelligence are confident of their own abilities and recognize that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of any individual parts.

Maximizing collective intelligence relies on the ability of an organization to accept and develop "The Golden Suggestion", which is any potentially useful input from any member. Groupthink often hampers collective intelligence by limiting input to a select few individuals or filtering potential Golden Suggestions without fully developing them to implementation.

Knowledge focusing through various voting methods has the potential for many unique perspectives to converge through the assumption that uninformed voting is to some degree random and can be filtered from the decision process leaving only a residue of informed consensus. Critics point out that often bad ideas, misunderstandings, and misconceptions are widely held, and that structuring of the decision process must favor experts who are presumably less prone to random or misinformed voting in a given context.

The best-known collective intelligence projects are political parties—which mobilize large numbers of people to form policy, select candidates, and to finance and run election campaigns. Military units, trade unions, and corporations are focused on more narrow concerns but would satisfy some definitions of a genuine "C.I."—the most rigorous would require a capacity to respond to very arbitrary conditions without orders or guidance from "law" or "customers" who constrain actions tightly. One interesting proponent of the rigorous view is Al Gore, the United States Democratic Party candidate for President in 2000, who noted that "the US Constitution is a program that lets us all do together what we could not do separately."

Now apply this to the communities on the internet and eventually to the mobile / hand held devices. The blogging phenomenon can drive / make or break a product or a service. Suppose we were to take together the collective clicks of people on a banner, we can get a fair idea of their needs.

Or the downloads of a particular kind.

Imagine the potential of creation of a monetizable collective.

True, you will be assimilated!!!