Swarm Creativity Blog

My friend Geoff Dutton just finished describing our analysis of Cowbird , an online community of storytellers, envisioned as an anti-Facebook by Jonathan Harris of wefeelfine fame. We basically found that this is an intrinsically motivated group of writers, who use writing as a therapy for soothing the soul. It is a close-knit community, with writers doubling up as readers of the stories of others, which they can "love". It seems that writing on cowbird is done mostly for being "loved". Somewhat worryingly for cowbird, the average number of loves per story seems to be doing down, as is the overall positivity and emotionality of the stories. Here is Geoff's  story about cowbird on cowbird .

All software development has been done by Patrick de Boer The goal of this project at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to create an interactive history book of the most important people of all times from Wikipedia. In a first step towards that goal, we focus on the English Wikipedia, extracting its 800,000 people pages. In future work we intend to repeat this process with other language Wikipedias, to get an understanding of the key influencers over time in different cultures. In this first prototype created from the English Wikipedia, all people pages are dated, by extracting the dates of birth and of death of each individual. Moreover, the links originating and pointing to their Wikipedia page are gathered. Using this information, 4900 networks through history, from 3000 BC to 1900 CE are calculated, as shown in figure 1. From all the links originating and pointing back to a particular people page, only the links to and from people living at the sam...