StigmergicWeb

I really did try to stop myself from talking any more about bloggers at the Democratic National Convention, but then Dave Winer posted a link to this article by Jack Kapica at the Globe and Mail. He makes a great observation about the role of bloggers in a media environmnet that is owned and dominated by a few media conglomerates.

Bloggers are rushing in to fill a void, one that was once held by local newspapers, who sent reporters as representatives of a constituency back home to report on major events in the way that mattered to their communities. Consolidation of ownership in the media has largely done away with that.

A good observation - bloggers are becoming the eyes and ears of the people. This has been seen with 9/11 (when I found that good old slashdot was the best source of up to the minute news) and the Iraq war (can we hope to have a more authentic description than Where is Raed?). And although the accusation has been made that bloggers are less objective than professional journalists, it is certain that the bloggers voice is a more authentic voice. Objectivity will be the voice of history, which is to say the voice of the winner. I think that an authentic voice may be more important for us to understand and feel what it is like in the shoes of the people who are there.

I activated my Gmail account earlier today, after having wrangled myself an invite, and have been impressed so far. I like the interface and the way that email conversations are grouped. The labels are a good feature, similar to the way I would put email in folders with other programs/sites, and the search capability looks very powerful, although I haven’t had the chance to really try it out since I only have about a half dozen emails so far.

What I am most intrigued by, however, is the spam filtering. There have been a few accounts of tests of gmail’s spam filtering capabilities, but what I’m interested in is how it works. In the Inbox, each message (or conversation, or whatever it is each thing in the inbox is) has a checkbox beside it, and a button up top saying report spam.

I found this intriguing because it doesnt’ merely mark an email as spam, but reports it.

Over on the side navigation bar, there is an entry that allows me to look at all my spam.

Clicking on this, I can see that there is spam already in the spam folder! This gmail account is only about 1 hour old, but it is already recognizing spam. How can this be possible?

My only guess is that the email filter develops its rules for recognizing spam based on the collective intelligence gathered by each gmail user! Brilliant! Presumably, the filtering is somewhat personalized, perhaps based on the content of the email I do not declare as spam. Every new user from now on has an automatic set of spam rules built in. This should only improve so that every new gmail account will be drawing upon a slightly better set of rules, and also incrementally improving the filter rules. This is so deliciously stigmergic!!

I’ve been watching students in two of my classes engaged in a fascinating process over the past few days, and I can best describe the process as antwork. They have been working on a project on Agricultural Practices in Saskatchewan in small groups of 2 or 3. Individually, they have been developing interview questions, interviewing, and in some cases taking pictures. All the content they created was put online by Movable Type, not specifically for its blogging capability but for its flexibility in content management. The site made by my class is one of four sites created as a school project in putting resources online - other projects included an Online Recipe Book as part of a project exploring how food is presented in magazines, a set of diaries and discussions about Romeo and Juliet, and an exploration of Land Claims of Indigenous Peoples around the world.

I refer to it as antwork because it has the characteristic of how ant colonies arise out of the actions of individual ants. Individual ants carry out their actions as individuals, and each individual ant does a miniscule amount of work. But when there are several thousand or tens of thousands (like in my basement), the aggregate effect can be staggering. Like ants, each of the students did just a little bit of work gathering or entering information. Many students (and other teachers involved with the project) were surprised how quickly the sites came together once they started entering information.

In parallel to this project, I have been reading with great interest the Small Pieces Loosely Joined project initiated by Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman and Alan Levine. (BTW, Alan is the creator of the uber cool feed2js scripts/site - a fantastic stigmergic tool). The project/presentation is intended to demonstrate how small tools that are easily and readily available to a wide variety of users can provide useful and unique communication and collaboration tools. For the sake of discussion, participants in the project are asked to blog/wiki/chat/other their advocacy for a centralist, decentralist or convergence (previously called the fencesitter) position.

My students’ work is, I believe, a prime example of convergence in action. The work was decentralized because they were each working as autonomous agents (well - semi-autonomous really since I did make this a requirement for the class). They developed interview questions, found people to interview, took picures and did all the knowledge-gathering work. I set very few restrictions on the interview (and was rewarded with a couple of interviews that I wouldn’t have thought of including, but turned out to be dynamite). As much as possible, however, I gave them the responsibility to go out into the world and gather the resource we needed (interviews with farmers, in our case).

At the same time, the communication was centralized. They were all using a content management system that was accessable through any web browser. The pages they made were all standards compliant XHTML/CSS. The reports were all linked from a single main page. The centralization was not a control center, but a capability for communications between my students and … well, anyone in the world really!

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. Entire Free Software projects are being developed by core groups of developers whose only line of communication is e-mail. Mailing lists, wikis, blogs and instant messaging are also effective online communication tools that help people with common interests create a conversation despite vast distances between them.

That’s what antwork is all about! Give everyone the tools to build and create. Use a standard communication protocol so anyone can talk to anyone. Let each agent sniff around the landscape and start pushing some ideas around, and eventually ideas will bump into each other and start to converge into a complex framework.

Mathemagenic: learning and KM insights - 10 June 2004::Wow - a great summary of some thoughts on the social collaborative nature of websites. Lilia hits the nail on the head when she says “…weblogs are more than bunch of linked egocentric websites.” They create a discourse within and between them that is often difficult to see, although tools like trackback make it easier to draw out some of that discourse. This is an interesting read after the DCoP workshop two weeks ago - I think that having agents within the policy community as bloggers, then aggregating their blogs, would be a powerful tool. I wonder if this is already happening anywhere?

OK - its not quite as rousing a rallying cry as Hoover’s “a chicken in every pot” but let me add my adulation to Brian Lamb’s cheers for Alan Levine’s RSS2JS script. I like the idea of being able to put an RSS feed in the content of any web page. That’s stigmergic!