February 23, 2003

Mama, what's a stigmergy?

Christian Crumlish

Over a month ago Scot Hacker sent me an interesting link via Weblogsky to Joe Gregorio's post about the web, Google, webogs, and stigmergy. I noted it down as something to investigate and write about and the electronic pile promptly accumulated on top of it. I wondered about the root of the word. Is it from "stigma" (a mark) and -ergy as in emerge or energy or synergy?

I finally found my way to the article in question and so now I kind of understand. Stigmergy is a term from biology describing unintentional cooperation in which two or more organisms leave effects on the environment and interact with (are affected by) each other's leavings. This is my off-the-cuff definition after a quick read, so don't go citing me in your dissertation.

Looks like this concept may now have relevance to the Boggloogler acquisition (my goal is to use a different hybrid trademark each time I mention it).

I read an interesting comment in the Well's blog conference today from kafclown. He noticed that his Blogspot-hosted Rhode Island Blog for the first time has started showing ads for local (Rhode Island) advertisers.

Up to now he's just had the generic blogspot ads rotating in that space. He figures that this is a sign that Google's already selling ad placement based on keyword matching. If that's true, then that sure was fast!

This would be the first sighting (for me) of any new s-word effect from the Blogger + Google merger (there I used the normal form for search-findability purposes).

Posted by xian at February 23, 2003 3:04 PM
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