(2012-07-24) Bottlenose Public Beta Collective Intelligence

BottleNose has gone into public-beta.

Nova Spivack believes it can help improve our Collective Intelligence.

Bottlenose is the best tool for people who want to be in the know, and the first to know. Bottlenose brings a new awareness of what’s trending online, and in the world, and how those trends impact us all. Hrm, sounds like your basic Meme Tracker.

I think that better Collective Intelligence really comes down to enabling better collective consciousness (Shared Language?). The more conscious we can be of who we are collectively, and what we think, and what we are doing, the smarter we can actually be together, of our own free will, as individuals. This is a bottom-up approach to collective consciousness... But how could we provide something like a self for groups, or for the planet as a whole? What would it be like? Actually, there is already a pretty good proxy for this and it’s been around for a long time. It’s the Media... The media reflects who we are back to us... It turns out it’s not a very accurate mirror... The news (Journalism) is increasingly about sensationalism, fear, doubt, uncertainty, violence, hatred, crime, and that is not the whole truth... For Social Media to really do a better job than the mainstream media, we need a way to organize and reflect it back to people at a higher level. That’s where curation comes in.

All you really need is a better mirror. A mirror big enough for large groups of people to look into and see what they are collectively paying attention to in it, together. By providing groups with a clearer picture of their own state and activity, they can adapt to themselves more intelligently. Everyone looks in the collective mirror and adjust their own behavior independently, but you get emergent self-organizing behavior as a result. The system as a whole gets smarter. Hrm I don't believe this at all.

Collective intelligence is an emergent phenomena, it’s not something to program or control. All you need to do to enable it and make it smarter, is give groups and communities better quality FeedBack about themselves. I don't believe this, esp when "feedback" is just more opinion.