| Peter Small's Stigmergic Systems Site | 14 comments |
 30 Oct 2003 @ 14:23, by Roger EatonThis is the first of a series of Link Reviews, short descriptions of websites and weblog entries that relate to the voice of humanity project. Stigmergy is coordination via changes to the environment. For instance, ants leave trails that have a meaning to other ants. Like maybe, "here I am leaving this trail coming home with a nice chunk of hotdog bun; check it out!" As more ants follow up, the trail becomes stronger, attracting yet more followers. Simple local rules for the individual add up to complex social behavior. One application to the web is in the way links add up in Google's PageRank algorithm. Every web link is another human ant strengthening the trail. Joe Gregorio has a blog article along these lines. But Peter Small, at his Stigmergic Systems site, has another idea. Small's notion is to use website log analysis, which tracks a user through the website noting times and links followed, and user input to automatically evolve a website. Frankly, there is less than meets the eye in his involved explanations, but there is no denying how very curious is the idea he is pursuing. The whole site evolves! The structure of the site, the look of the site and the structure of the content as provided by user input, all change randomly. User reaction to the new design is captured in the website logs and analyzed to decide if the change was beneficial. If so, then the change is kept, else discarded. That is the simple idea behind it, anyway. Peter Small's notion to evolve a website on the basis of user interaction can be applied to the metaweb. Each entrance to the metaweb will be a link from a home page for a particular category of the voh (voice of humanity) network. The metaweb link should lead to a set of portal pages that mediate between the category homepage and the metaweb. These portal pages need to be highly automated, based on the ratings and input of the users who pass through the portal. Portal link categories should evolve both automatically and via human input by users, perhaps free wiki-like human input or perhaps more constrained human input as in Peter Small's agents in a box -- or both. |