Wisdom is in managing crowds?

Only a few years ago, user-filtering sites such as Digg were seen as more of a fad than a legitimate way of organizing people and information. That has changed. In 2004, James Surowiecki published The Wisdom of the Crowds. In 2006 Time gave a formal nod to the masses in declaring “you” the person of the year. Now we have traditional academic institutions - such as Oxford in this case - contributing to a research base on the dynamics of distributed networks for information creation and sharing. I’m surprised by how antiquated the findings seem. We need “serious academic research” to tell us what we’ve known for years (that distributed networks are used for “sharing, contributing and collaborating”)?