Seesmic and the Wisdom of the Crowd

Here's a recent example of how one Sessmic user, Sukhjit2008, sought help from the Seesmic community to solve a real time problem. She wanted to buy a webcam for her parents to get them up and running on Skype. They have a Mac Mini so she went to Best Buy to look for the iSight camera but it wasn't in stock. Frustrated by not getting the help she needed from the Best Buy staff she logged onto Seesmic from a computer at the store and recorded a video message to the community asking for advise. Sukjit titled the video thread, "Loosing it at Best Buy" and within minutes she started getting replies from her Seesmic friends offering advise to help her with her purchase. Kevin Spidel posted this same video on his blog as Why Seesmic Will Change The Game


This is a great example of the wisdom of the crowd, it's problem solving though video messaging. Of course, a live video chat would be better but instant real-time is the next best thing. In this case, Sukhijt had a real problem and posted a call for help to the Seesmic community which quickly appeared from all over the world. By the end of the thread the problem is solved with her purchase of the Rocketfish™ - Webcam. We see Sukjit made it to her parents house (and after fixing her audio) she introduces them to her Seesmic friends. The last video in the thread was recorded by Bruce Prokopets who seemed quite amazed by it all and said, "this is social media at work at it's best."

The Seesmic community continues to grow as well with the recent news that, Movable Type Now Has Video Comments On Seesmic Too. The Seesmic blog said,"We now support Movable Type, WordPress, Disqus, Cocomment, Drupal (API support, plugin coming) and Dotclear (unofficial) to add video comments. The plugins are already installed in about 1500 sites and blogs."

UPDATE: See Seesmic Video Comments Go Live on MovableType Blogs on Beet.TV that includes an interview with Seesmic evangelist Cathy Brooks.

UPDATE 2: Sukjhit sent this Twitter message regarding her parents new webcam:

sukhjit @klessblog That was cool! will be linking to it.. u may b happy to hear my mom & dad did their 1st skype call using new cam yesterday! 09:02 PM July 01, 2008 from twhirl in reply to klessblog

Related: Wisdom of Crowds from Wikipedia.