Swarm Intelligence.

OpenP2P.com hosts an interview with Eric Bonabeau entitled "Swarm Intellegence".

via (Underway in Ireland)

[Smart Mobs]
9:31:19 AM  #  

Meta-data by humans (and other semantic web stuff). The challenge of getting people to author metadata.

Here's a presentation on "The Economy of Distributed Metadata Authoring" by  Stefano Mazzocchi . A few passages ring especially true to me.

First Law of Metadata Quality:

• Artificial intelligence is just that: artificial!
• So: for a system that feels smart to humans, you need human-crafted metadata

Suggestions:

• Do all efforts to make instant return on the investment of metadata authoring
• Don't ask too much
• Be smart but not smarter

Some of the same wisdom went into the design of the Internet Topic Exchange.

[Seb's Open Research]

Right on to Seb - as he seems to grok intuitively the big picture issues.  My only comment would be that as much as we need humans to create the meta-data, there still is MUCH MORE that we need a Topic Registry to do.

As I've requested before - Matt Mower's LiveTopics (I'm a Radio user - so I'm addicted/or shall I say dependent upon LiveTopics to express my personal ontologies) - needs to do some of the slave labor for me.  Why should I have to go and find TopicExchange.com and manually paste in my post into my channel of choice?

That's bizarrely medieval in it's crudeness.  That's what computers were invented for - to automte those slave tasks.  Let alone where we'd go once a true topic registry was in place.

BTW Seb also has a great pointer to some more 'Semantic web' stuff:

The semantic web explained (without the agonizing pain). A very neat, painless introduction to the Semantic Web (pdf), from Toronto-based Semaview. [Co-construction des savoirs à IDITAE via Michel Dumais via Gilles Beauchamp] From the same source, check out these one-minute overview charts: The Semantic Web, RDF vs. XML. And while we're at it: there's a new Journal on Web Semantics.

[Marc's Voice]
9:28:18 AM  #  

Andy Rhinehart is experimenting with an RSS feed of help wanted ads from the Spartanburg Herald.  Very cool.  It would be even better if there was an e-mail address attached to each job posting so people could respond.  He is also using the multi-author tool in Radio to publish a weblog for the paper's news stories. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
9:25:38 AM  #  

Salon.  Today, NASA released details of the e-mail exchanges (that occured days before the failed re-entry of STS-107) between NASA engineers on whether the shuttle would come apart on re-entry.  In my view, if NASA was using weblogs throughout on their organization's Intranet, it would have helped surface the concerns of these smart engineers.  In reality, the relevant decision makers were operating in a vaccum.  A simple Intranet search on "wing or wheel well damage" before making the decision to recover the vehicle would have pulled up a plethora of interesting information and viewpoints that weren't considered. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
9:15:27 AM  #  

Aggregating Your Life into One Page.

Will Richardson is starting to "get" it:

More RSS Thinking

"I think I'm starting to understand why Jenny and so many others are really hot on RSS and its potential. The more I mull over the scenarios of how it might work in the classroom, the more interested I get.

Aside from the rather mundane (at this point) concept of having kids subscribe to different feeds for information gathering and research purposes, the whole idea of using RSS for basically schoolwide communication is really wild. I know that I'm assuming a lot here, like teachers and administrators and parents will a) be open to the technology and b) care enough to use it."

Now take another giant leap for mankind and imagine a news aggregator that has your local newspaper's headlines, news from your municipality, programs you've noted interest in from the park district, announcements from both your kid's school and teacher, status reports from your kids' sports teams, a notice of the "special of the day" from the local coffee shop you love, and on and on and on.

Yes, it's an information explosion contained all on one page and you don't have to do the work! That's why I think RSS (or something very much like it) will be very big. On cell phones, PDAs, tablets, and laptops, it makes great sense for portability. Of course, we'll need better aggregators and they'll have to support services like authentication, prioritization, multimedia, and things we haven't even thought of yet. The key will be to create an aggregator that looks and acts like a web page. You won't call it an aggregator. Instead it will be sold as "the daily news you want" or something like that. It will have a catchy name that my neighbors would understand and actually try. It won't be a "technology" - it will just be useful.

And wouldn't it be great if it was brought to you by your local public library!

[The Shifted Librarian]
9:07:15 AM  #