A groundbreaking study by Eric Mattson and Nora Barnes from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, shows that contrary to popular opinion, “The social media revolution is coming to the business world.”

“Initial signs of corporate investment in social media can be seen in Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube and News Corp’s $580 million purchase of Intermix Media (parent company of MySpace.com).” But these acquisitions were expected. What this study intends to find is if “the hype is real,” by looking at the Inc. 500, “an elite group of the fastest-growing companies within the United States.”

I had an opportunity to talk to Eric Mattson to discuss the study and ask him some questions about social media.

Muhammad Saleem: You mention that according to previous research, only 8 percent of the Fortune 500 currently have a public blog. Do you generally find business to be slow adopters (or afraid) when it comes to technology?

Last week NewAssignment.Net interviewed Fabrice Florin of Newstrust about his experiment in rating the news online. In this post our correspondent, Muhammad Saleem, shares how this relates to blogging.

Blogs are not governed by the same principles that govern traditional journalism. In fact, they are not governed at all. This is because most bloggers don’t consider themselves to be journalists reporting the news, rather they are providing an outlet for conversation and promoting dialogue.

This means bloggers are able to write things that would be impermissible in traditional media outlets, and this information can be without any factual basis and rife with bias, which raises an important question. How can you know if a particular site is trustworthy?

To Fabrice Florin of NewsTrust, the difference between a journalist and a blogger is irrelevant.

“After a certain point, it is not even about being a good journalist. It is about being a good citizen. I think the basic rules of public discourse imply that fairness, evidence, and such principles are really what make a good citizen, not just a good journalist.

Earlier this month a new type of socially driven news site launched. NewsTrust (covered here by NewAssignment.Net), lets users judge a story on journalistic merit — not mere popularity. The endeavor is lead by former journalist Fabrice Florin.

NewAssignment.Net caught up with Florin to learn more about this leap in social news, where the ethics and standards of journalism as a profession can be analyzed and scrutinized by the wisdom of the crowd.

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Q: What kind of funding do you have, and how do you plan on monetizing your project? I see you accept donations, is that the only method (a-la Wikipedia)?

Florin: Our biggest restriction right now is funding. I have personally funded this out of my pocket, with a small grant, and one donor. We are severely underfunded and so are going very slowly.

We see three sources of revenue for NewsTrust over time.

Why has collective intelligence become such a big deal? With the rise of social media (wikis, social bookmarking sites and socially driven news and content aggregation sites), it seems that everyone wants to get on the bandwagon.

The principle behind collective intelligence is that a conclusion reached in collaboration with and from competition among multiple individuals will be more intelligent than any conclusion reached by an individual, no matter how smart.

Before we can harness the power of collective intelligence, we have to understand a few things.

1. What is collective intelligence?
2. Why do we need collective intelligence?
3. How do we harness collective intelligence?
4. How do we make sure we don’t get collective stupidity?

Stephen C. Buckley, is the Associate Director of the Center for Digital Business and Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT.

I contacted the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT since our two projects are quite similar, and had a chance to speak to Stephen Buckley, the Associate Director.
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How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before? Why and under what circumstances do we need collective intelligence?

People right now don’t quite know what the secret sauce is for connecting people and computers in ways that at least seem to be intelligent.

Some people think that collective intelligence is some kind of magic pixie dust that you can sprinkle on top of any kind of a situation or problem, and it will automatically solve it. Then there are other people that criticize collective intelligence efforts, for example, like Wikipedia, because it’s not perfect, and therefore they believe that the only way to do things, organizationally, is through a centralized command and control structure.

Both schools of thought are probably equally wrong.