Thursday, March 13, 2003

Emergent Democracy, Stigmergy, and Polling A new paper by Joichi Ito describes the notion of emergent democracy. It's a fascinating paper, but not without its conceptual flaws (see below). Many of the ideas in this paper can also be found in Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs. A related paper of interest is Joe Gregorio's Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web. Somewhere in the middle of this cornucopia of ideas lies my newest novel-in-progress. Joichi Ito's premise is straightforward: that weblogs show a possible way for organizing the internet into a form of direct democracy. Policy and consensus arise as emergent properties of the "blogosphere" in this model; that is to say, the individual transactions, postings and links of bloggers don't in themselves constitute a democratic system, but their collective behavior creates a kind of "intellectual commons" that does. So, how can we take measure of the blogosphere in terms of opinion and/or voting? We can search the web via Google, we can search RSS feeds via Roogle, but how can we summarize all the positions being taken? Perhaps bayesian filters could be used to find strong associations between word pairs, such as "war : no" or "tax : cuts : no"? I've been thinking about polling solutions in conjunction with news aggregators, something that would allow blog readers to quickly chime in without needing to write their own weblog entry or comment or whatever. Imagine, as part of your everyday weblog reading, one of your subscribed RSS feeds contained a "question of the day". You read the item, then click on one of several buttons, and your vote is registered (It could be anonymous or not, whatever). The trick is to make it extremely unobtrusive: read the question, vote, done. 10:28:03 AM

Alert over Hong Kong 'super-flu' A global warning is issued about a virulent flu and pneumonia sweeping hospitals in Hong Kong and Vietnam. [BBC News | WORLD] Heads up, everyone. Is it too late to get a flu shot? 9:45:48 AM