Ben Tesch is about to launch a collaborative weather site called cumul.us. It'll aggregate weather information and harness the wisdom of crowds to see if they can make better weather predictions than the experts.
Tyler Cowan predicts Ben's effort will fail:
I'm not so sure. If the weather report says, "chance of rain in Toronto," and the crowd in Mississauga is getting wet, I take the umbrella. Moreover, when I'm planning a trip to Vancouver, I look for average temperatures as a means to an end: I want to know what to pack. It's much better to know that everyone is wearing a scarf. The genius of Ben's site is in removing the middleman -- most of us want a weather report that's good enough to keep from looking like a dolt. And as long as we're doing what everyone else is doing, we've done it. If we're all wet, at least we're all wet together.how many government agencies already work at predicting the weather?, or in other words the crowd is already in place.
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