Blogs and Blogging
I've been using the Web to keep track of my own doings for more than 5 years, blogging in my current work pages before I knew I was speaking prose, but I confess that I hadn't heard the term 'blog' until perhaps six months ago. In the last two months I've been a constant lurker on a widening array of blogs, and I've found myself more and more drawn into the world of daily updates and interconnections. Every day seems to bring an expansion of this world, and to thread yet another of my own interests into its proliferating discourse. A google search for 'digerati tribe' brought me Blog Tribe Social Network Mapping, posted just a week before on Ross Mayfield's blog. The point is that these are not just solopsistic maunderings of webgeeks: their interconnections and function as means of rapid information dispersal within communities is becoming more and more central to the intellectual lives of a rapidly-expanding ...well, tribe. The recent flurry over bookmarklets is an especially interesting case in point, because of the information management tools it delivered into a remarkable number of hands in a matter of days, and the epidemic of innovation it provoked. The term stigmergy fell into my hands only yesterday --and that meme is propagating rapidly as bloggers pass on the link to Joe Gregorio's posting (http://bitworking.org/Stigmergy.html ).