Tag: internet

Stigmergy beats pedantry

2 individuals interact indirectly when one of then modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment at a later time. Such an interaction is an example of stigmergy.

The World-Wide Web is the first stigmeric communication medium for humans.

The World-Wide Web is human stigmergy. The web and its ability to let anyone read anything and also to write back to that environment allows stigmeric communication between humans. Some of the most powerful forces on the web today, Google and weblogs are fundamentally driven by stigmeric communication and their behavior follows similar natural systems like Ant Trails and Nest Building that are accomplished using stigmergy. The web is new. In the context of written human history is barely a blink of an eye. Yet as new as the web is, it is already showing its ability to support complex human interactions that mimic natural systems use of stigmergy. And were just getting started.

right-on. we are taking baby steps towards the global brain, sidestepping the ordeal of the pedantic web. id rather blog than type in angle brackets all day and worry about resources, properties and statements.

information far from the median

If information is extremely exclusive, then one can charge a lot for it; if information is extremely broadly available, then there’s power — and ultimately value in economic terms — in that, too. It seems to me that perhaps what’s “less valuable” is the information in the middle zone, where it’s neither exclusive nor extremely broadly read. The Net is a trap for the unwary in this regard. If you keep things close and don’t use the Net for dissemination, you might lose access to some potential readers. If you are aiming for broad circulation and you come up short, then you end up with something of little value.

a very insightful analysis. i was never much a fan of proprietary information (it prolongs the wait for the singularity), and have been working to make it easier to spread information cheaply, reliably and targeted. a page rank of 6 is probably the lower bound for being noticed..
reminds me of the growth trap for companies: midrange companies have lower profits than both small and large companies. don’t be average.

The Jamaica Digital Divide

i couldn’t keep my mouth shut, and now i’m the driving force behind a project to build a web-based music / articles management system for the government of jamaica. through the network of charlie, OSCOM was asked to do an amalgamation of our various systems with harvard tools, get a nice unified interface, and finally jet over there to instruct the locals how to use it. as is often the case with my ventures, this one is quite iffy too. for starters, it’s not clear whether the government officials in charge will still be in power after the next elections, we haven’t heard their precise requirements yet, it’s not clear who will be involved and in what role etc. although to be honest, i think clear-cut projects are boring.

Zurich underbelly

I decided to participate in the 20min community. Seems like they have a lot of users, are very popular in zurich (no wonder, being a free newspaper) and their web section is run by teens who are a) cheap b) innovative. A smart move on their part. They have all kinds of services, like an “i’m i hot or not?” clone, a dating service and more. Unfortunately their community is only visible with a login, or i would link to some of the most hilarious entries. It seems like some fun can be had, we shall see.

Personal CMS

Mitch Kapor (ex Lotus) is building a personal CMS with Andy Hertzfeld (ex Apple). Very interesting architecture, and with these people behind it has a high chance of seeing the light of day.
2004-10-15: Google Desktop Search brings my vision of a personal cms (for lack of a better term at the time) a step closer. As I am writing this, outlook express is synchronizing my 2 IMAP stores to the local disk so that the indexer may pick them up. this gives me at least access to my existing emails while the wait for thunderbird support continues. I’ll start using slogger to save all my Firefox sessions permanently to disk and see how it goes. (Don’t forget to filter out 127.0.0.1 or you’ll have a nice little feedback loop with slogger picking up your desktop search pages, storing them, desktop search indexing them, etc)
Using adblock aggressively should help to keep the signal to noise ratio of those saved pages as high as possible.
I wonder where SharpReader keeps it’s local copy (currently 23841 posts) and if this facility gives me a way to search through posts that have expired.
I will try to get a good-sized gmane nntp feed in through outlook express to see if it gets picked up as well.
I also noticed that my Trillian chat logs are not being picked up even though they are text files. maybe it is just a file locking issue, but it still makes me wonder why AOL chat logs are singled out in the preferences.
Of course, once you have full-text search over most of your digital footprints (which now seems within reach), you begin to wonder what else you could do. correlating information (what sites was i visiting while I had that IRC conversation?), visualizing connections (show me other mentions of the term “projectx” over time), bayesian techniques (show me sites I might find interesting based on my accumulated data). Eventually we will all be using MyLifeBits.
2005-05-17: For those who already freaked out over the minor changes the google toolbar makes on their site (only if you specifically trigger it, a fact that was conveniently swept under the rug), what will they make of this? personal content management? the writable web? another step towards Xanadu?

Platypus is a tool for modifying web pages and then saving those changes so that they’ll be repeated the next time you visit the page. Changes are made by selecting an element on the page and then hitting a key to use one of the commands below. To save your changes so that they’ll be applied the next time you visit the same web page, hit Save (Ctl-S). This will bring up a window containing a GreaseMonkey script. Install this script and you’re done!

2018-08-12: Memory is central to problem solving and creativity.

In this essay we investigate personal memory systems, that is, systems designed to improve the long-term memory of a single person. In the first part of the essay I describe my personal experience using such a system, named Anki … The second part of the essay discusses personal memory systems in general. Many people treat memory ambivalently or even disparagingly as a cognitive skill: for instance, people often talk of “rote memory” as though it’s inferior to more advanced kinds of understanding. I’ll argue against this point of view, and make a case that memory is central to problem solving and creativity.

useless

If you spend any amount of time on the Net, you quickly realize one thing: People have WAY too much free time. They’re out there creating scores of the most peculiar, odd, amusing sites you can imagine. These are some I’ve come across.

fighting barney


i had an awesome night at the eff fund raising party. the dna lounge is a nice club for sure, and hearing it firsthand from wil wheaton how he hates shatner was triple A. turns out he knows about our little software project, and he loves it. the celebrity match with barney was a trip. add in some awesome ladies, fine music, and you get an awesome evening, which ended in some apartment in north beach, sf. the next morning we literally stumbled across friends of ours who had crashed at the same apartment! that incident reminded me that i should really check out some of the schmoozing sites. i will admit it i’m beginning to like that schmoozing thingie, i’m becoming a social whore. 🙂