Ming the Mechanic:
The Metaweb and the Global Mind

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 The Metaweb and the Global Mind2004-04-04 10:49
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Via Voice of Humanity, a very inspiring article from Nova Spivack: The Metaweb: The Global Mind Just Got Smarter:
One of the many cool things about the Metaweb is that it functions as a vast bottom-up collaborative filtering system. RSS feeds represent perspectives of publishers. Because feed publishers can automatically or manually include content from other feeds they can "republish," annotate and filter content. Every feed is effectively a switch, routing content to and from other feeds. You are my filter. I am your filter.

Entire communities can collaboratively filter information, in a totally bottom-up way. The community as a whole acts to filter and route content in an emergent fashion, without any central coordination. On top of this sites can then provide value-added aggregation and information-refinery services by tracking memes across any number of feeds and then repackaging and redistributing them in virtual feeds for particular topics or interests. And these new feeds are fed right back into the collective mind, becoming raw materials for still other feeds that pick them up.

What we have here is the actual collective consciousness of humanity thinking collective thoughts in real-time, and we get to watch and participate! We are the "neurons" in the collective minds of our organizations, communities, marketplaces. Our postings comprise the memes, the thoughts, in these collective thought processes. Already the Metaweb is thinking thoughts that no individual can comprehend -- they are too big, too distributed, too complex. As the interactions of millions of people, groups and memes evolve we will see increasing layers of intelligence taking place in the Metaweb.
Is the web really turning into the global brain waking up and becoming smarter than any of us? Why not? It is probably the best candidate to do so.


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3 comments

5 Apr 2004 @ 08:17 by swanny : Well I suppose...
Well I suppose he or shes got my vote
as long perhaps as their names not
HAL ......
*sighs*

swanny  



7 Apr 2004 @ 10:31 by ming : RSS
RSS has existed for a few years. It is a standard for creating a "feed" of headlines or whole postings, or just about anything one can think of. Most weblogs have them. Then one can read those feeds in an "aggregator", which allows you to see all of it in a uniform format. The aggregator simply picks up the RSS feed over the web every hour or so, and has it ready for you when you go to look at it. The cool thing about it is that it puts more of the control with the user, and it allows you to get an overview of a lot of information more easily. The best place to start is by getting an {link:http://blogspace.com/rss/readers|aggregator}.  


13 May 2004 @ 17:04 by ov : Stephenson's Metaweb
found at www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml was started by Neal Stephenson on Sept 22nd of last year in conjunction with the first book in his Barougue Cycle trilogy, Quicksilver. I've just discovered this site but it's an official Neal so I can't see it doing anything but getting better all the time. Neal's books are all part of one larger book, which is actually something like a virtual relaity within his head, perhaps a semantic reality; you don't read Neal's books you enter into and play them like an RPG with telepathic interface. (Maybe it just seems that way since I've read both Diamond Age and Cryptomicon within the last two weeks; the story between the lines is much better than what is written, and what is written is a damn good story)  


Other stories in
2014-09-27 00:04: You must be an expert by now
2014-09-26 15:15: Brevity
2011-11-06 21:33: Counting what counts
2011-01-23 13:46: Authenticity
2010-08-23 01:31: Semantic Pauses
2010-06-27 02:28: Doubt
2009-10-25 17:04: Opinions, perceptions and intuition
2009-10-15 08:32: Abstraction
2008-06-29 16:47: Complicated and Complex
2008-02-20 16:39: The universe as a virtual reality



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