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20 Nov 08

The Ninth Transition of Evolution - Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

collective intelligence

www.kk.org/...the_ninth_trans.php - Preview

evolution technology twine collective-intelligence super-organisms cooperation

What Nova Spivack suggests here is that the path from random population to meta-individual is a path of increasing structure. The parts are more tightly bound in relationships, and as they gain in interdependence, the whole advances to the next phase.
Smith and Szathmary say that evolution is the continued, graduated progression in which smaller units form larger, higher level units, and then those new meta-individuals start to form a new group, where each meta-individual is a mere individual
2 more annotations...
- Robert Wright, writing in "Nonzero" argues that the evolution of humanity is one long progression of increasing cooperation, starting from the first cell of life, where both "sides" win.
- For the ninth transition in life's evolution -- the transition to a planetary level organization of humans and machines -- we should expect to see:
  
  1. Increased cooperation among humans, benefiting both humans and the OM.
  
  2. Increased span of interdependence. Planetary scale, things happening and enduring longer or quicker than before.
  
  3. Increase complexity of informational flow. New ways of connecting, organizing, relating not possible before.
  
  4. Emergence of a new level of control. An innovation (like DNA, or spinal cord, government) that takes control of functions in order to benefit constituents non-zero-ly.

11 Dec 07

Why Yahoo! Answers is a librarian's worst nightmare. - By Jacob Leibenluft - Slate Magazine

a great comparison of yahoo-answers and wikipedia

www.slate.com/...2 - Preview

collective-intelligence wikipedia yahoo-answers

A Librarian's Worst NightmareYahoo! Answers, where 120 million users can be wrong.
By Jacob Leibenluft
Posted Friday, Dec. 7, 2007
9 more annotations...
- Like Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia isn't perfect. But for savvy browsers who know how to use it, Wikipedia is an invaluable source of factual information.
- Wikipedia's greatest virtue is that it is self-editing and self-correcting.
- They focus users' energy on revision rather than addition. By contrast, Yahoo! Answers is more devoted to quantity than quality.
- If new information becomes available or a new user devotes energy to making improvements, then a Wikipedia article will get better even years after it's first posted
- The small, almost obsessive community that built Wikipedia created a culture of reliability.
- This system highlights the site's greatest strength and its greatest weakness: Everyone gets credit for answering, but there's not a huge push to make sure the answers are right.
- As its devotees would point out, Yahoo! Answers allows you to ask questions Wikipedia would never touch. Many of the site's users are simply looking for advice, local knowledge (like a restaurant recommendation), or an opportunity to start a discussion.
- The lesson Yahoo! Answers teaches is that, for millions of people on the Web, it's less important to get a good answer than to get someone to listen to your question in the first place.
- Related in Slate
  In 2005, Paul Boutin reviewed Wikipedia, calling it a "Real-life Hitchhiker's Guide" to the galaxy. In 2004, Clive Thompson assessed online communities struggling to create art. Christopher Beam suggested ways to cobble together a search engine that trumps even Google. Michael Agger examined Wikiscan, the Web site designed to unmask "Wikipedia vandals."

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The editor and the crowd

www.roughtype.com/...the_editor_and.php - Preview

collective-intelligence hive-mind nicholas-carr social-news wisdom-of-crowds

In his book on Google, The Search, John Battelle makes a similar point using different terms. He says that the internet contains a "database of intentions." Every search we make, every link we click, every word we write, every moment we spend looking at a page - each is a little piece of data about ourselves that we leave behind.
But I do think we can learn something important here, something about "the crowd" and "the editor" and their respective roles - and maybe, at least by implication, something about the evolution of media, too.
4 more annotations...
- But there are other things that the crowd is quite good at. The crowd tends, for instance, to be much better than any of its members at predicting an uncertain future result that is influenced by many variables. That's why stock market indexes beat individual money managers over the long run.
- The crowd aggregates all individuals' knowledge about variables while balancing out their personal biases and idiosyncracies. It's not the "wisdom" of crowds that makes crowds useful, in other words; it's their fundamental mindlessness. What crowds are good for is producing average results that are not subject to the biases and other quirks of human minds.
- As we adapt to the internet, we may just learn to forget that an algorithm, no matter how elegantly conceived, is no substitute for a person, and that a crowd, no matter how full of "wisdom," is no substitute for an editor.
  
  But I hope we don't.
- Posted by nick at March 9, 2006

04 Dec 07

10 Semantic Apps to Watch - readwriteweb.com

A key element is that the apps below all try to determine the meaning of text and other data, and then create connections for users.

data portability and connectibility are keys to these new semantic apps - i.e. using the Web as platform.

www.readwriteweb.com/...10_semantic_apps_to_watch.php - Preview

collective-intelligence read-write-web semantic-apps trends

Note that we're not necessarily talking about the Semantic Web, which is the Tim Berners-Lee W3C led initiative that touts technologies like RDF, OWL and other standards for metadata. Semantic Apps may use those technologies, but not necessarily.
What is a Semantic App?

Firstly let's define "Semantic App". A key element is that the apps below all try to determine the meaning of text and other data, and then create connections for users. Another of the founders mentioned below, Nova Spivack of Twine, noted at the Summit that data portability and connectibility are keys to these new semantic apps - i.e. using the Web as platform.

25 Nov 07

Amazon.com: The Wisdom of Crowds: Books: James Surowiecki

www.amazon.com/...ref=pd_sim_b_title_3 - Preview

amazon behavioral-economics book collective-intelligence crowd-sourcing game-theory hive-mind james-surowiecki

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest).
"Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge.
2 more annotations...
- He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory.
- Most of us believe that valuable nuggets of knowledge are concentrated in few minds. We believe the solution to our complex problems lies in finding the right person. When all we have to do, Surowiecki demonstrates over and over, is ask the gathered crowd.

01 Sep 07

Programming Collective Intelligence

radar.oreilly.com/...programming_col.html - Preview

collective-intelligence emergence internet web2.0

The content that users contribute explicitly to Web 2.0 sites is the small fraction that is visible above the surface. 80% of what matters is below, in the dark matter of implicitly-contributed data.
In many ways, the defining moment of the Web 2.0 revolution was Google's invention of PageRank, the realization that every link on the World Wide Web was freighted with hidden meaning: a link is a vote about the importance of a site. Understanding those votes, and the relative importance of the sites that were voting, gave better search results than merely studying the web pages themselves.
1 more annotations...
- No one would characterize Google as a "user generated content" company, yet they are clearly at the very heart of Web 2.0. That's why I prefer the phrase "harnessing collective intelligence" as the touchstone of the revolution. A link is user-generated content, but PageRank is a technique for extracting intelligence from that content. So is Flickr's "interestingness" algorithm, or Amazon's "people who bought this product also bought...", Last.Fm's algorithms for "similar artist radio", ebay's reputation system, and Google's AdSense.

31 Aug 07

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

www.kk.org/...post.php - Preview

collective-intelligence fan-fiction harry-potter hive-mind kevin-kelly

10 Apr 07

Collective Intelligence: Cogenz, ConnectBeam, Stikkit, Diigo | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone

www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9700829-2.html - Preview

collaboration collective-intelligence diigo review web2.0

We've seen Diigo before, but now it has a few tweaks to simplify it. Diigo is meant as a collaborative research tool to let you highlight and bookmark specific portions of text you find on the Web. Diigo now also lets groups discuss highlighted text and and publish it onto a blog.