Jonathan

As usual Mr. Gladwell has impressive insights. This time he looks at the power of 'thin slicing' which is essentially making a snap judgment about something. The key to that blink reaction being accurate though has much to do with the observers expertise in an area (you need to have some) and the context in which they are making the determination (you need to have a neutral, unbiased way to make the judgment or it may be unavoidably affected).

If you are reading this, you are participating in 'crowdsourcing' and after listening to this, I had to become a member of the audible crowd. Soo...There are lessons in here about how to harness the power of community via the internet. I would recommend to anyone working on sites or applications that included collaborative elements.

After Outliers and Blink, I went searching for more of Gladwell's work and while this wasn't quite as earth shattering to me as the others, it was very good. In a nutshell, there are certain elements to any mania, fad or other 'thought epidemic' and he clearly details the types of people (e.g. 'connectors', 'mavens', 'persuaders') and the circumstances present when these things take off.