Swarm Creativity Blog

Today I played around with Google ngrams . In particular, I was curious how the popularity of the two concepts "altruism" and "egoism" developed over the last one hundred years. It turns out - at least among the English speaking writers - that there was a tipping point around 1978, where the egoists became a minority, and altruists became more popular. Unfortunately, altruism peaked in 1998, and has been going down since then. There is a bit of hope, however, as towards the very end it seems to be picking up again. For the sake of comparing the different cultures, I then ran the same query in German, using the German words "Selbstlosigkeit"(altruism) and "Selbstsucht" (egoism). Here are the results: It's very different! For the most part of the last century, the Germans were obsessed with egoism. Altruism has basically stayed flat over the last one hundred years, while egoism peaked during the two World Wars. At least German egoism (to be mor...

We did some more coolhunting on Twitter over the last few days to check out if the negative advertising blitz against Newt Gingrich that Mitt Romney is running right now in Florida has any impact on the Twittersphere. The answer is “Yes, by all means”, which explains why even in the Romney tweets Gingrich is the most prominent word in the term view, and Gingrich is much more central among twitterers than Romney in the combined Romney-Gingrich view in Florida. To measure that, we collected 4 twitter maps: 1. All the tweets in the US about Gingrich and Romney: As we can see, the twitterers about Gingrich tweet more, and they are also more important. The purple lines are the retweet network containing the words “gingrich” or “romney”. 2. All the tweets in Florida about Gingrich and Romney: In Florida, few people tweet about Romney compared to Gingrich. But let’s now look at what these people tweet about, when they tweet about Gingrich in Florida: This picture has been computed using Condo...

Based on earlier work analyzing and visualizing the hidden links in Wikipedia, we have added a new dynamic Wikipedia mapping function to Condor. The new Wiki-Evolution feature collects all links originating and/or pointing to one or more Wikipedia articles over a given time period. Today I used this feature, to see what the Wikipedians have to say about Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich . The picture below shows the bidirectional link network of the most important articles about the two contenders for RepublicanUS presidential candidate. The nodes are colored by actuality (the more edits they have in the last 14 days, the darker the red. (0 to 20 edits is grey, 21 to 50 edits is orange, over 50 edits is dark red). As we can see, the articles about the two candidates have attracted the most edits, but also the rock group LMFAO (whose singer SkyBlu was involved in an altercation in a plane with Romney in 2010), Pope John Paul II (who shares the distinction with Gingrich of having been chos...

With the crisis in the Eurozone approaching its climax, I was curious to read the collective mind. On the Web, in the blogosphere, and on Twitter there is a lot of buzz about Eurozone breakup or survival. I decided to ask both the swarm (through blogs) and experts (through News Web sites) as well as the crowd (through Twitter), using our Condor coolhunting tool. It turns out, swarm and experts think the Euro will survive intact - albeit by quite a slim margin: The picture above shows the Blog/Web site network, with the two search terms weighted by the importance (betweenness centrality) of the bloggers and Web sites. The bloggers/Web sites vote 52% for Eurozone survival, and 48% for Eurozone breakup. The crowd, measured through the tweeters , believes the opposite. The picture below shows the snapshot of today (11/27/2011) of the retweets about “euro survive” and “euro breakup”. The crowd on Twitter votes only 33% for Eurozone survival, with a decisive 67% of the vote for Eurozone brea...

Today (11/20/11) I ran a Condor twitter analysis for #ows (the Occupy Wallstreet Twitter tag) and #teaparty (the Tea Party Twitter tag), trying to predict public sentiment for these two social movements. I only collected retweets, and constructed the retweet-network, measuring the importance of people retweeting based on their social network position. The picture below shows the resulting network, each dot is a twitterer, each line is one or more retweets. Surprisingly we get three clear clusters, a Occupy Wallstreet cluster (blue, at the bottom), a Tea Party cluster (yellow, in the center) and a mixed cluster at the top. Red dots are people tweeting both about #ows and #teaparty. A closer look at these three clusters tells us that the blue cluster is Occupy Wallstreet sympathizers talking about issues near and dear to them, the yellow cluster is Tea-Party sympathizers doing the same about their cause, while the mixed cluster at the top consists of Occupy Wallstreet sympathizers badmou...

Last Friday night I had a great discussion with Billie Bivins, host of the show " Make Art...Feel Better " at the Belmont Media Center about creative swarming and the bees. She even got me to cobble together my own bee. Here is the link to the resulting video . Very cool.

The first version of the Wikimaps Page ( http://www.ickn.org/wikimaps/ ) that we published a couple of weeks ago helped to visualize the basic idea of Wikimaps. It consists of an interactive animation that allows visitors to visually track the changes in Wikipedia articles over a given time period. Real world activities and events are reflected in updates of the respective articles and the links between them. Rise and Fall (of Swiss Tennis Star Hingis) on Wikimaps A good example is the retirement of the Swiss tennis player Martina Hingis. While her page (node) is still well connected to the network in 2008 (roughly a year after she retired), the page is not listed in the network anymore after February 2010. It is important to note that this view of the network is filtered and only displays nodes that “survive the cut”: The page of the former number one ranked player is still there and has many links pointing to it, just not enough to appear in this filtered “most important pages” view...