A month or so ago I was sitting in traffic listening to an NPR interview with Jon Spector, co-author of We Are Smarter Than Me, a new book about the wisdom of the crowd. Not only was the book about... A month or so ago I was sitting in traffic listening to an NPR interview with Jon Spector, co-author of We Are Smarter Than Me, a new book about the wisdom of the crowd. Not only was the book about that topic, it was that topic: Spector was just one of thousands of participants in the creation of wiki-generated book.Rather than have this wiki-wielding mob rehash the implications of Facebook or Wikipedia, Spector and his principal co-author, Barry Liebert, herded this very large pride of cats in the direction of less trammeled ground: how businesses are using the wisdom of the crowd to garner ideas, opinions, and other valuable material. Not a bad idea for a story …Which is precisely where our new Social Media 360 blogger, Lena West, has gone with this week’s big feature article: Mob wisdom means business. The plainspoken Ms. West has been stirring the Web 2.0 pot for InfoWorld since mid-October, turning a critical and sometimes scathing eye on social media, while highlighting best practices for business. In this article, Lena digs into the business value of crowdsourcing — and how Best Buy, Dell, Netflix, and others have used the wisdom of the crowd for product brainstorming, market development, and much more. And no crowdsourcing story would be complete without a close examination of predictive markets, and the uncanny accuracy they’ve displayed in forecasting everything from the outcome of elections to the right day for a product debut.Crowdsourcing is even being used in journalism, a fact that has made more than one reporter I know uncomfortable. There are good reasons for that — mainly to do with checking sources and other journalistic best practices — but this radical democratization has also highlighted important stories that would have otherwise drowned in the mainstream media noise. Mob wisdom goes further than closing the gap between producer and consumer. It turns the consumer into a stakeholder in the endeavor, be it a new product, a wiki book, a feature article, or — who knows? — the solution to global warming. The more you participate, the more you get back. In case you haven’t guessed, that’s an invitation to InfoWorld readers, too. Technology Industry