Transcript of Howard Rheingold’s TED-2005 talk about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action—and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.
Category: network
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Shift happens
Finally, an excellent video about ”’the emergence of our global collective intelligence”’. Watch it on ”'[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q Shift Happens]”’. It’s about .
Stumbled across a wonderful website yesterday with a lot of awseome and open source Flash applications that produce wonderful graphics, many of them fractal, complex. [http://levitated.net/ Check out Levitated.net]—a friendly company.
Martijn van Steenbergen tipped me on The Storm Worm:
Some key points:
- Storm is designed like an ant colony
- Rather than having all hosts communicate to a central server or set of servers, Storm uses a peer-to-peer network for C2.
- And even if a C2 node is taken down, the system doesn’t suffer. Like a hydra with many heads, Storm’s C2 structure is distributed.
Reminds me of an experiment I did we did with Jini and RIO. Once started up on several computers, we just couldn’t get the system down. Kill one, and somewhere else a new one pops up. Thought of desigining in a “suicide pill” that would trigger on some special message spread across the net.
[http://www.semanticwave.com/blog/archives/000282.jsp SixApart: Opening the Social Graph]:
:We think that the best way for you to manage your network is to stop thinking about all of the little pieces and to start focusing on the big picture: you and the people who matter to you. We think relationships mean more than email addresses or which service you’re signed on to at the moment. So we’ve created an experimental demo based upon open technologies OpenID, the Microformats hCard and XFN, and FOAF that allow you to see your entire network of relationships in one place – across services, across platforms, across the entire Web.
How wonderful! I’ve been wanting this for ages! Even started the [http://wiki.aardrock.com/Campfire Campfire] experiment a couple of years ago to address exactly this issue. I fully endorse opening the social graph.
(Via [http://www.semanticwave.com/blog/ Semantic Wave].)
[http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/17/1724253&from=rss SwarmOS Demonstrated at Idea Festival]: “PacoCheezdom writes ‘Intelligent Life has short summary of a demonstration by MIT professor James McLurkin of his new group-minded robots, which run an operating system called ‘Swarm OS’.
The robots are able to work together as a group not by communicating with all members of the group at once, but by talking only to their neighbors, and model other similar behaviors performed by bees and ants. ‘[http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/17/1724253&from=rss Read more of this story] at Slashdot.
(Via [http://slashdot.org/ Slashdot].)
[http://www.groovyactors.org/ 
]
Refreshed my link with Gerald “[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity tensegrity]” de Jong, triggered by a blog entry from TED titled [http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TEDBlog/~3/152990430/theo_jansen.php Creatures on the beach] from the Dutch sculptor Theo Jansen which instantly reminded me of Gerald’s [http://sourceforge.net/projects/fluidiom/ Fluidiom] and [http://www.darwinathome.org Darwin at Home] projects.
Gerald’s email signature also mentioned [http://www.groovyactors.org/ Groovy Actors]:
:In a nutshell it’s a natural next step, building further on object-oriented programming (OOP), where objects become active talkative peers.
:Imagine running thousands of concurrent programs on one computer where each program instance represents something or someone in the real world. Some things are passive and only react to events but lots of real world things also take initiative.
:That’s why parts of this kind of system can better be represented in software by “autonomous agents” or “actors” which frequently interact with each other.
And built using the Groovy language.
Just wondering why ”’Groovy Actors are limited to a single computer”’ rather than ”’autonomous peers distributed across thousands of computers”’. Love to have concepts from [[Erlang]] and [http://javaspace.org JavaSpaces] built in.
Love to see the Groovy Actors’ [http://www.groovyactors.org/examples/02.html Hello Storage] example implement the story of [http://wiki.aardrock.com/Wizard_Rabbit_Treasurer The Wizard, The Rabbit, and The Treasurer].
A new programming language? Well, at least one I never heard of until today. It’s called [http://www.erlang.org/ Erlang] and one of the interesting aspects are that it eases ”’concurrent programming”’ and ”’distributed processes”’.
Erlang is a programming language designed at the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory. Open-source Erlang is being released to help encourage the spread of Erlang outside Ericsson.
The language syntax reminds me a bit of Prolog. And I wonder what the power would be if something like Erlang is combined with the elegant concepts of [http://javaspaces.org/ JavaSpaces].
I’m still longing for an elegant platform neutral programming language that has mechanisms for ”'”effortless” peer-to-peer”’ built in. In fact, our new social and wisdom fabric cries out for a new “programming” language (and perhaps OS) that catalyses p2p development on all layers, from information to human to social to wisdom and that fuels the noosphere.
One of the first things I’d do with it is create an evolutionary prototype of [http://wiki.aardrock.com/Armillaria Armillaria] with [http://wiki.aardrock.com/Wizard_Rabbit_Treasurer The Wizard, The Rabbit and The Treasurer] as an example. [http://www.google.com/search?q=stigmergence Stigmergence].
[http://wiki.aardrock.com/Collective_Intelligence 
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Converted my [http://wiki.aardrock.com/Collective_Intelligence highlights from Pierre Lévy’s Collective Intelligence]—Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace to my wiki.
Pierre Lévy’s vision towards the noosphere…
Key words: ”’nomadic earth, molar technologies, anthropological spaces, collective intellect, informational universe, commodity space, knowledge space, molecular politics, preceding spaces, collective intelligence, agent intellect, territorial space, intelligent city, fourth space, angelic body, intelligent communities, intelligent community, intellectual technologies”’.
Beware, it’s 100 KB.
:[http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/ LiveJournal Creator Maps the Long Road to Open Social Networks]: “People are growing weary of registering and re-declaring their friends on every new social networking site. But Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal and OpenID, says that the tools to build a decentralized social network don’t yet exist. (Source: [http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/topheadlines/~3/146726716/brad-fitzpatric.html Wired])
Wow. About time. Since long I cherish the desire for a ”’scale-free distributed social network”’. Both [http://wiki.aardrock.com/Campfire Campfire] and [http://wiki.aardrock.com/Cheetah_Project_Proposal Cheetah] work in that direction, the latter for diabetics.
When will we have opened up our databases so you can update your personal information in a single action and everyone you want to are up to date too?
Talk about ”’trust”’. [http://wiki.aardrock.com/Armillaria Armillaria] can help to grow a ”’fully distributed social reputation system”’ to do just that. The [http://wiki.aardrock.com/Wizard_Rabbit_Treasurer Wizard Rabbit Treasurer] tells a small story of how this might work for the underlying data.
Love to work on a project like this. I’ll keep an eye on
(Via [http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml”>Wired News].)
Categories
Quantum Theory of Trust
The power and kinds of social networks: [http://www.drkaren.us/ Karen Stephenson] writes about it in [http://www.netform.com/html/s%2Bb%20article.pdf Quantum Theory Of Trust].
[http://wiki.aardrock.com/Network Get the big picture of social networks]. Oh, and while we’re on trust and reputation, the [http://wiki.aardrock.com/Wizard_Rabbit_Treasurer Wizard, Rabbit and Treasurer] will be a good read as well I suppose.