Swarm Creativity Blog

Well, I guess most of us would like to live forever. At least that’s what I think when I see how old people are clinging to their lives. On the other hand, if all of us would live forever, while producing more offspring, earth would soon overflow. So the solution, if we get eternal life, would be to have no children anymore. This, however, is in contradiction to Darwin’s evolution. We need to reproduce, to mix our gene pool, and adapt to the changes in environment. Evolution is brutal, too. It’s all about survival of the fittest, of trying to beat the competitor and make sure that my own genes reproduce. Mankind is no exception among the other species. The history of mankind is a history of wars, of killing one's enemies. Today this has been ritualized; the Geneva Convention describes what’s allowed and what’s not. But this is still far from perfect, frequently broken, abused, or ignored. The conclusion is, then, that we will be ready for eternal life when we will have reached per...

This morning I got a nice e-mail from Anna Miller, alerting me to the fact that the swarmcreativity blog has been listed in her post on " 50 Best Blogs on Creative Thinking ". I quickly looked at them, excellent selection. Thanks Anna!

Yesterday evening I was part of a great coolfarming experience. It was the final performance of Jazzaar , a one week workshop of practical music for talented young musicians culminating in public concerts on Friday and Saturday evening. Jazzaar is the brainchild of Fritz Renold , a Jazz musician, composer and music teacher. Every year since 1998 Jazzaar invites internationally renowned Jazz musicians to Aarau, where they teach and play with the most talented and motivated young musicians age 14 to 24 of the Canton of Aargau. For me how Jazz musicians play together is a great blueprint for how creative teams should work together. In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making old things up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammar and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others. According to “ A Passion for Jazz ”…”Jazz players will choose phrases that seem to be preordained so they intuitively know where they are going, even ...

Little did I know when I was attending one of the evening events of Swissnex that I was about to meet a truly impressive creator. After filling a heaped plate of food at the sumptuous buffet after the talks, I was looking for a place to eat when I noticed two attractive women in the back of the room. As soon as we started talking I noticed that they were not just a pleasure to look at and talk with but real creators. In my discussion with Magdalena, she told me that she was a graphic artist producing digital art . When she invited me to visit her in her studio I jumped at the opportunity. On a sunny afternoon the next week I climbed the stairs to her studio in Revere outside of Boston. The studio doubles as a gallery, displaying really cool art. When we sat on her couch in the middle of art books and framed digital pictures, Magdalena told me a bit about her life. She was born in Poland to parents of German descent, as a young adult she moved to Germany, later after she had married a...

Oscar Predictions Updated Here is an updated analysis of the Oscar predictions, run on March 2 nd , 2010. Again, sources being used were the collective mind of movie enthusiasts on IMDb.com and movie fans from all around the world represented by bloggers and Web masters. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was analyzed using a specialized version of sentiment retrieval with an adapted bag-of-words. Web and blog buzz values come from Cooltrend . Tapping the thoughts of this swarm delivered the following update to our older analysis: While IMDb users have two clear favorites, Hurt Locker and Avatar, the Web seems to favor Hurt Locker. Bloggers are seeing 500 Days of Summer in front right now, but this might change since the blogosphere tends to be relatively volatile in opinion trends. So, in sum we would expect Avatar to have the best chances on winning best picture, followed by Hurt Locker. Directors – here it is again a head-to-head race between Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker) ...

These days Forbes again published sport’s top earning athletes. In spite of his transgressions, Tiger Woods still leads the pack with $64 million, followed by soccer player David Beckham ($18 million), tennis star Roger Federer ($16 million), Nascar driver Dale Earnhardt ($14 million) and basket ball players LeBron James ($13 million) and Kobe Bryant ($12 million). I was curious to see if Web buzz and valuation of a player's attractiveness for corporate marketing executives from Nike, Addidas, Reebook and the like had any correlation. The two pictures below show the Web buzz share of five of the six athletes (I skipped the Nascar driver): And the blog buzz share: As the pictures show, the ranking at the top corresponds nicely. Tiger Woods is lonely at the top both on the Web and on blogs, but then there are some interesting differences. Kobe Bryant has more than his share on Web buzz compared to what corporate marketers paid for him, which means they got a good deal considering h...

Oscar Night is getting closer. On Tuesday Hollywood announced this year’s official nominees of the 82nd Academy Awards. As previously posted on this blog we are running our own Oscar predictions based on buzz in the Oscar forum on imdb.com and Web and Blog buzz analysis. Our latest results presented here were calculated on January 5th 2010 which is over one month before the nominations were released. In our analysis we focus on four categories, best picture, best director, best actress, and best actor. The following table for best picture shows the results of our Oscar-Coolhunting four weeks ago. We computed an Oscar Index for every movie. This index consists of combined Web-, blog-, and message board – buzz and can be interpreted as the relative probability of a movie to receive an Academy Award on March 7th. Our approach simply measures what the Web (this means all of us) thinks. It works by multiplying the “how many” with the “who”, i.e. multiplying what somebody says (in a forum o...