If you're interested in the wisdom of crowds I'd suggest trying a place like intrade where people can place bets on world events. Follow the trends.

20/20 did a piece on the idea in 2008 : http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4826867

>Before you read on be warned that this is a weird and strange place - http://halfpasthuman.com/
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>They go out of their way to say that they miss the mark on many predictions, and they try to make it spooky, but ignore that. So, using the wisdom of crowds. eg - Show a hundred people a bull and ask them how much it weighs. They'll guess wrong almost everytime. But average the guesses and the answer will be remarkably close to the exact weight. These folks take the searches people conduct through search engines and load the data into a SQL Server cube. Then they extract predictions, trends, co relations etcetera which they sell in a pdf format for ten dollars. After looking at their weird web site several times, I finally said . . ."it's only ten bucks" and I bought it. It is strange reading, but two dates stand out for this year. It seems that something big MAY happen near or on July 8th (financial) and November 11th (Terrorism). It also suggested that this spring there will probably be a volcanic eruption, but that didn't happen did it?