It’s Bracket Time
Today marks the start of a two day holiday at work for many Americans — also known as the first round of March Madness. By lunchtime, anyone with a TV will likely have it on in their office and the rest of America will be sucking up bandwidth by getting online updates and watching online video. The productivity chart for today and tomorrow will look a lot like Chris Anderson’s Long Tail.
Like many, I am participating in a pool with colleagues and friends. This year, though, CBS Sportsline offers a feature that they have not had in past years. (And hopefully you will see the relevance to this blog in a moment.)
As I was making my picks last night, I realized that when I hovered over a team name, it showed me the percentage of pool entrants who had picked that team. Since I am terrible at picking these things, I decided I would engage in an experiment. So I decided to base my picks on the “wisdom of the crowds” and I went with the choices that the plurality of other players had selected.
It will be interesting to see how it pans out (and for what it is worth, the crowd has picked a number of upsets).
We are either collectively brilliant or just a bunch of lemmings! 🙂
Let me know how that wisdom of crowds works out- I know nothing about college basketball, so every year I have 2 brackets- my picks based on about 20 seconds of analysis per matchup and my coin flip bracket based on a random number generator in Excel.