Solipsism Gradient

Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web is an extremely interesting article by Joe Gregorio, author of Aggie, a .NET-based news aggregator.

Stigmergy, a term coined by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé… is interaction through the environment.

Self-Organization in social insects often requires interactions among insects: such interactions can be direct or indirect.

… Indirect interactions are more subtle: two individuals interact indirectly when one of then modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment at a later time. Such an interaction is an example of stigmergy.

…The World-Wide Web is human stigmergy. The web and it’s ability to let anyone read anything and also to write back to that environment allows stigmergic communication between humans. Some of the most powerful forces on the web today, Google and weblogs are fundamentally driven by stigmergic communication and their behaviour follows similar natural systems like Ant Trails and Nest Building that are accomplished using stigmergy.

This is required reading for any weblogger or user of Google.

A pity “stigmergic” is such a cumbersome word. Gregorio himself misspells it several times. Curiously enough, his article doesn’t allow trackbacks or comments… two of the important new stigmergic resources.

Thanks to Sam Ruby for the link!

The big buzz this sunday morning is the acquisition of Pyra (the Blogger company) by Google. At this writing, no major news source (at least according to Google News) has published anything. However, there’s ample commentary on hundreds of weblogs and on SlashDot.

Befitting the occasion, Pyra founder Evan Williams blogged the news live from a session at the Live from the Blogosphere conference.

Blogger hosts more than one million weblogs, of which a few hundred thousand are actively updated. Half a year ago, when starting this weblog, I did some tests with Blogger but was frustrated by the lack of control over some things, and the relatively frequent downtime.

Tons of commentaries and analyses are already out. Oblomovka makes an interesting point:

Google buys Internet stuff it doesn’t want to go away

also citing Google’s buyout of Deja, a company that archived NNTP newsgroups.

Dan Gillmor has a good overview, noting the recent announcement of weblogging facilities by Tripod (Terra/Lycos) and the possibility of AOL doing the same in the near future.

Nick Denton asks:

…will Google use weblog links to improve Google News? Right now, news stories are selected by an algorithm which counts the number of similar stories, and promotes widespread items. The results are occasionally strange, and usually bland. A system which analyses inbound links from weblogs would produce a much better selection.

Google apparently wants to harness weblogger’s data mining and analysis to improve its own services, a very shrewd move. However, they need to do so without alienating other weblogging companies.

Clearly Blogger-hosted weblogs will be scanned and fed into Google indexes immediately, rather than after a delay that today ranges from hours to days. My guess is that, soon after getting a grasp of what can be done which this setup, they’ll offer plug-ins for software like Movable Type, and URLs which home-built weblogs can ping, to enter information from non-Blogger weblogs into their system.

Ben Hammersley writes:

Google lives or dies on fresh links – and processing the million or so weblogs will give them an awful lot of fresh links a day. No matter where you host your Blogger based blog, the posting will still go through a machine on Google’s network: it’d be easy peasy to scrap each posting for URLs and add them to the spider-now list. Not every link, perhaps, but if a certain number of bloggers link to the same thing in a certain time, Google grabs it. It’s a distributed early warning system for Google’s spiders. One million zeitgeist monitors just signed on to Google’s staff. A bargain for them, whatever the cost.

Update: Tons of comments already out at MetaFilter. As well as more name suggestions: Booger , Goggler…

I wasn’t going to post about the war, but this post by Burning Bird is too good to pass up…

I found out what was wrong. My trackback:ping URL contains a ‘&’ character which was not being escaped to ‘&’, so the autodiscovery routine was falling back to the rdf:about URL, which contains the permalink instead of the trackback URL.

In other words, here’s what the corrected trackback autodiscovery comment looks like now:

<!--
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
         xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
         xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
<rdf:Description
    rdf:about="http://www.brockerhoff.net/bb/viewtopic.php?p=259#259"
    dc:identifier="http://www.brockerhoff.net/bb/viewtopic.php?p=259#259"
    dc:title="Re: Trackbacks are up - I think"
    trackback:ping="http://www.brockerhoff.net/bb/posting.php?mode=track&p=259" />
</rdf:RDF>
-->

This is copied exactly from the Trackback autodiscovery example. The question is, older versions of Movable Type apparently used the rdf:about URL for the trackback ping… so shouldn’t that entry contain the trackback ping URL for backward compatibility, instead of the permalink?

Update: Ben Trott of Movable Type informs me that the rdf:about field should contain the permalink. Apparently compatibility is not an issue…

Update: I was wrong… the & must NOT be escaped. See my post above.

Posted by NSLog();:
NSLog(); linked to this post

TrackBacks and AutoDiscovery

Ben has an entry here about TrackBack and auto-discovery. Overall, auto-discovery works pretty well. I don’t concern myself with finding TrackBack URLs unless I notice a site didn’t get pinged. What I dislike, however, is that trackbacks aren’t sent within my site. If I link to a previous article, why isn’t it sent a TrackBack? Why shouldn’t a reader who might stumble on to that earlier article not see that I linked to it in a later article? (Update: This is now working as Rainer has the answer – comment out the line next if $url =~ /^$archive_url/; in /lib/MT/Entry.pm.

Posted by Just A Test Blog:
Just A Test Blog linked to this post

Autodiscovery check

Let’s see if autodiscovery works now, by linking to here from MovableType this should generate a trackback ping.

Yesterday I worked on some more patches to the site’s code, but my provider had some sort of outage… supposedly they were updating to new versions of Apache, mySQL, php and whatnot. In any event, access slowed down to a crawl – or even dropped out completely – until very late in the night.

Anyway, I got up around 1 AM to get some water and couldn’t resist checking on my way back to bed; it was working again. That’s the downside of having “always-on” Internet and putting the computer to sleep instead of shutting down… it’s way too easy to get online!

Finally, someone came along and articulated my view that fearing gene-modified foods is silly. Richard Dawkins, noted geneticist and inventor of the “meme” meme, wrote this:

The genetic code, on the other hand, with a few very minor exceptions, is identical in every living creature on this planet, from sulphur bacteria to giant redwood trees, from mushrooms to men. All living creatures, on this planet at least, are the same “make”.

The consequences are amazing. It means that a software subroutine (that’s exactly what a gene is) can be carried over into another species. This is why the famous “antifreeze” gene, originally evolved by Antarctic fish, can save a tomato from frost damage. In the same way, a Nasa programmer who wants a neat square-root routine for his rocket guidance system might import one from a financial spreadsheet. A square root is a square root is a square root. A program to compute it will serve as well in a space rocket as in a financial projection.

…What this means is that there is a case to be made on both sides of the argument, and we need to exercise subtle judgment. The genetic engineers are right that we can save time and trouble by climbing on the back of the millions of years of R & D that Darwinian natural selection has put into developing biological antifreeze (or whatever we are seeking). But the doomsayers would also have a point if they softened their stance from emotional gut rejection to a rational plea for rigorous safety testing. No reputable scientist would oppose such a plea. It is rightly routine for all new products, not just genetically engineered ones.

Recommended by Mark Frauenfelder on boing boing.