Blog of Collective Intelligence

It seems that Facebook can help members in "real-life" communities and networks to be more visible to themselves and increase their opportunity to think, feel, learn, and act together. That brings up two questions:

What combination of current Fb apps could support a circle of friends in cultivating their collective intelligence and wisdom?

What new, innovative app can you imagine that could become a big CI booster? (Hint: some of the categories, into which I classified this entry, serve me as reminders of the context for this question.)

Posted by at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just come across yet another interesting, simple but somehow limiting definition of how collective intelligence is achieved, in the The Hype and the Hullabaloo of Web 2.0 by Ellyssa Kroski:

"Companies that adhere to Web 2.0 principles understand how to harness the collective intelligence to make their systems better. A collective intelligence is achieved when a critical mass of participation is reached within a site or system, allowing the participants to act as a filter for what is valuable. The user reviews on Amazon.com sort out the worthy resources from the inadequate. Citysearch’s user-created reviews identify quality restaurants..."

It was then picked up by Five Great Ways to Harness Collective Intelligence of Dion Hinchcliffe, which lists:

Continue reading "Web 2.0 marries collective intelligence" »

Posted by at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just finished reading an amazing book by Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor at of the Washington Post, titled "Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human."

Garreau presents three scenarios of the future: the "Heaven" of technological optimists, like Ray Kurzweill, the "Hell" of technological pessimists, like Bill Joy; and the "Prevail" scenario of people like Jaron Lanier who doesn't believe in technological determinism and thinks that:

"Even if technology is advancing along an exponential curve, that doesn’t mean humans cannot creatively shape the impact on human nature and society in largely unpredictable ways."

The quotes below are from "Radical Evolution".

Continue reading "Connectivity ramp, CI, and Jaron Lanier" »

Posted by at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Thierry Nabeth of INSEAD has just alerted me of a new social networking phenomenon called "tagging". In his message there was a reference to a Salon.com article in which Howard Rheingold said about tagging:

"It's like Friendster for knowledge as far as I'm concerned. I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they've tagged ... And isn't that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful -- and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you."

I think using tags for growing collective intelligence requires more than a clever technology. Unless we think of CI in the statistical sense (as in The Wisdom of Crowds), it requires the art of integrating the triple network of People, Knowledge, and Technology. Tags (bookmarks referring to the same subjects) collected from millions of bloggers are not more useful than a Google search that turns up over a million pages in response to my query. When somebody comes up with a way to integrate tagging with my trusted circle of friends and colleagues, then CI got a potent new tool, indeed. Technically, it shouldn't be difficult and I'd be surprised if an innovative social network host would not be already working on it.

Posted by at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Fourth international seminar on Collective Intelligence at the University of Ottawa

8, 9, 10th of August, 2004

THEME:
Collective intelligence is a very broad field, with many research programs. The Ottawa seminar is concerned with the research program developed at the CI Lab of the University of Ottawa. The participants of the seminar will discuss the projection of digital information into a 3D virtual world mirroring CI processes thanks to the Digitong semantic coordinate system.

See DRAFT PROGRAM below.

Continue reading "Seminar on CI at the U. of Ottawa" »

Posted by at 7:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi Euan, R U planning to attend NotCon 04? One of the speakers will be Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive. He is a guy with an amazing, literally "far out" vision of universal access, and the Wayback Machine supporting it, whom you really should meet.

Of course, I would never tell you what you "should" :-) but in this case, I do it for the good of the whole, which would greatly benefit from the two of you connecting with one another and exploring your vision and aspirations, if you have not yet done so. To nudge that chance, I'll email this URL to Brewster with whom I had some beer yesterday on a sunny terrace, in Amsterdam, and exchanged ideas about how to dream into being some unprecedented capabilities of collective intelligence.

I would love to go to NotCon 04 but have prior commitment to attend. I plan to follow it remotely, so if you go, don't forget to blog it. Here's the freshest pic of Brewster, from the terrace:

Why I gave the "The untapped potential of the Internet Archive for CI" title to this entry? Not enough time to tell it right now, but if you meet Brewster or follow in this blog my explorations with him and his friends, I'm sure you will find out.

Posted by at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)