Stigmergic Web

Alan started the meme (CogDogBlog » Blog Archive » When Was Your Blog-Ha Moment?), Brian and D’Arcy followed up on it, and after a bit of thought I think I’ve come up with the answer. But what is a Blog-Ha Moment? Thus sayeth Alan:

What was it the triggered the 10,000 watt light bulb going off in your head that screamed, “Wow! There is something really powerful about this way of expression”

When I was working as Computer Coordinator for my school division, I started taking a look at Movable Type, and I think I had set it up a couple of times, but never really did much with it – I don’t think I had much to say at that point. Same for Blogger – I made up a couple of accounts and blogs, which were quickly abandoned. I think I was looking at them from the perspective of testing some tools that I could show the teachers, not something for me.

That changed after listening to Stephen Downes speak at the AMTEC conference in 2002 in Regina. After listening to him, and subscribing to OLDaily, I became aware of some different things that I wanted to voice my opinion on. So I started blogging with Blogger (the blog is still there, if you want to take a look).

I dove whole-heartedly into blogging, and dragged other people along with me. The coolest moment – the Blog-Ha – was my participation in the Small Pieces Loosely Joined wiki-blog-chatfest initiated by Brian Lamb, Alan Levine and D’Arcy Norman. Thanks to an aggregation script by Stephen Downes, posts from my blog were being automagically aggregated together with other bloggers who were writing about the SPLJ. (The SPLJ aggregation is still up – take a look, there’s some good stuff there) This created a group blog from all the individual entries on everyone’s individual blog. Wow! That amazed me – and made me feel like what I was writing really helped to contribute to a larger body of knowledge. I even wrote a post that was quoted on the SPLJ fence-sitters page:

To me, this is the sweet spot of educational technology – decentralize the tools and centralize the communication. Interestingly, the internet, particularly the web, have done both. Free applications and operating systems are being widely distributed online. Many of the applications are small, specialized tools (as opposed to the one-product-does-it-all-its-a-floor-wax-and-a-desert-topping variety of application produced by large software companies). At the same time, the internet offers many possibilities for centralizing communication.

(Yeah, I know – quoting myself is a bit narcissistic, but it is relevant)

Then I stumbled across this from Joe Gregorio, talking about stigmergy and the world-wide web:

And now finally we get the point. The whole point of this is the connection between the web and stigmergy. The World-Wide Web is the first stimeric communication medium for humans.

Blog-Ha! Sometimes, every once in a while, someone out there has already written what I’m thinking, and always much more clearly than I could put it. :^)

The ideas seem to bump around and sometimes stick to each other, and sometimes those idea clumps start to take on a life of their own – ideas like open source or open content have certainly become well developed in a relatively short time, and they were created mainly by little ants like us doing a little bit at a time.