The audience collectively knows more... at least in this museum!

Article: http://www.onfocus.com/2006/10/3860

This is a cool article that talks about one man's experience/story in a museum, where great amount of detail and information had come from the museum-goes and not from the museum curators!

And once the museum curator realized this, he would follow a different track.

"Along the way, I noticed other types of information the guide was relating such as trends. He'd say, 'everyone always asks about this piece of equipment right here.' And then he'd explain what that was. He was using audience patterns to tune his presentation."

"So the tour guide had three different types of knowledge he was passing on: 1.) extended information about exhibits from the museum, museum-goers, and his own scholarship. 2.) Behind-the-scenes information about the construction of exhibits. 3.) Trends that he's noticed in the behavior of museum-goers. And I thought that the tragedy of this is that all of this knowledge vanishes when he's not around. In fact, I'd been to the museum several times and hadn't hit this vein of information. With this info, the museum was a completely different experience. "

Finally, "Companies are competing for user-generated content, and those sites that give voices to their users are some of the most visited online. Journalists are starting to realize that their audience collectively knows more about a topic than they do. Sites want to personalize experience so that people get the most out of their visits. People turn to their online social networks to find/sort/filter data on a regular basis."