[swarm theory and social media]

I'm in the final stages of editing a selection of articles to appear in an upcoming journal issue and one of the articles deals with swarm theory. Many readers here would recognise Howard Rhiengold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution or perhaps Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang who coined the term in 1989 (see the *trusty* resource wikipedia).

More recently there's the famous National Geographic article on swarm theory: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/swarms/miller-text/1 which does an excellent job (exciting and informational) of explaining the science behind swarms. Enter left stage, the ants:

"I used to think ants knew what they were doing. The ones marching across my kitchen counter looked so confident, I just figured they had a plan, knew where they were going and what needed to be done. How else could ants organize highways, build elaborate nests, stage epic raids, and do all the other things ants do?

Turns out I was wrong. Ants aren't clever little engineers, architects, or warriors after all—at least not as individuals. When it comes to deciding what to do next, most ants don't have a clue. "If you watch an ant try to accomplish something, you'll be impressed by how inept it is," says Deborah M. Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University.

How do we explain, then, the success of Earth's 12,000 or so known ant species? They must have learned something in 140 million years.

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence."

And that, in a nutshell, is collective intelligence and why crowd sourcing can be beneficial (knowing the right questions to ask helps too) and why tools like twitter are great resources for getting tips (maybe even on finding the shortest path to food).

As the National Geographic writer, Peter Miller, says of the ant colony the same can be said for social media: "no one's in charge."

[user-created content a *must* for gaming]

At the transliteracy colloquium on Tuesday we talked about the role of co-operation and collaboration in transliteracy and Sue brought up Surowiecki's "wisdom of crowds." Today I read Doug Lombardi, marketing director at Valve Software, argue that home consoles must embrace user-created content if “they want online to matter.”

"Half-Life 1 was okay as a multiplayer game and Team Fortress Classic was really good, but Counter-Strike kicked both their asses no question. And that came from a kid going to college in Canada and another kid going to high school in New Jersey, who had our code and thought it would be cool to play our game.”

"The PC has that great advantage; has had that great advantage, and it comes from multiplayer and modding starting in the early '90s and [online] multiplayer only showing up on consoles in 2000 or 2001.”

“You've got a good 10-to-15-year lead there and you still have broken pathways on both consoles, so the PC has the advantage of time and a clear pathway," he added. "You've got a freeway set up on the PC and you've got this dirt road with roadblocks all over it on console in terms of getting user-made content out there."

As it stands, home consoles are only just starting to become acquainted with user-based content, as seen in the Playstation 3’s LittleBigPlanet from Media Molecule, which is distributed player to player.

However, Valves upcoming project, like many efforts that stemmed from PC titles, will likely be a commercial effort, requiring certification.

"I would love to see that happen, but I think the platform holders are always going to need certification, which means it's usually going to have to be a commercial thing," admitted Lombardi.


Story from Gameworld Network