Unconscious collaboration

We are all well aware of the amazing results that masses of people could produce by collaboration. Wikipedia is the most evident proof of how many not-specialized people can contribute to a bit of a huge project and together compete (and sometimes surpass) with field professionals (about this you can take a look at this TED talk and this book).

Google Flu screen

More than that, it fascinates me thinking what value the “unconscious collaboration” could produce. If we take the recent Google Flu we have an insight of what potential has the information produced by millions of people (in this case web researches). I believe the elaboration of this huge amount of data opens new scenarios and applications. Some time ago I came across to a proposal of using the localization data of mobile phone users to derive information about traffic (anyone aware of a follow-up?). One problem about these applications is the privacy, but this should be dismissed by the fact that millions of data point are merged together with no chance of backtracking.

In my view we will see more and more application of this concept, far from the traditional marketing applications, with completely new objectives (as tracking flu’s pandemic in Google Flu, got any new idea?). Furthermore I believe that the spread of internet-connected, electronic devices will definitely boost this data production by making it even more pervasive.

Who can point me a good overview about spimes?