del.icio.usから立ち上がる知性とmulticellular computing

キーワードはStigmergy。stigmergyとは今まさに形成されつつあるシステムの中でのコミュニケーションの方法でそこでは個人は他人とコミュニケートするために自分の周囲の環境に合わせるというもの。これはまさにdel.icio.usでタグを付けた後，ポピュラーなタグに沿ってタグを修正していく行為と同じと言っていい。del.icio.usのタグが簡単なコミュニケーションをとるためにピジンからクレオールに変わる瞬間といってもいい。以前IBMで働いていてバイオロジーの造詣が深いSteve Burbeckのmulticellular computingは生物学のタームが情報学に応用できないかを考えるものでstigmergyはその重要なタームの一つとなっている。

Steve identifies four themes from biology that he thinks might usefully translate to information technology: specialization, polymorphic messaging, stigmergy, and apoptosis. At least two of these terms may be unfamiliar to you, as they were to me. Stigmergy, Wikipedia currently says, is "a method of communication in emergent systems in which the individual parts of the system communicate with one another by modifying their local environment." Apoptosis is cell suicide.

In his book - The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker talks abut how you get from a pidgin to a creole. A pidgin is what you get when you throw people together who have no common language and gramatically its kind of a mess. But the children of pidgin speakers spontaneously create creole languages and those are gramatically complete. All you need to make it work is an environment in which people can easily speak to each other, hear one another and adjust what they say according to what they hear. The social tagging services just get out of the way and try to let those conversations happen. Is this how we wind up creating the Semantic Web? I'm guessing that it is.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/04/14.html#a1427
http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/2006/03/how_social_book.html
http://www.blogwerk.de/?cat=25