A recent discussion from Another Useless Blog has brought my thoughts back to emergent intelligence. I did one of my favorite searches on Google again to see if there was anything I could do to help organize the blogosphere into the seed of a superconsciousness. I found a great entry in the blog Escapable Logic. Even so, I can't help thinking that Al Qaeda are more intensely dedicated to destroying freedom than the blogosphere as a whole is to preserving it. A true intelligence thinks seriously about it's own survival.

Emergence by Steven Johnson is still in my mind. He suggests that an emergent intelligence usually comes from smaller units following a set of simpler rules. I guess that if there is a set of rules like that for us the blogosphere as a whole will have to come out with the final version. Maybe that isn't the way it will work at all, but I think it's worth thinking about.

Here's my second proposed rule, if anyone is interested enough to try to make improvements.

2. The Sensory Cortex rule

Just as much of the human brain is devoted to dealing with input from the senses, and much is also devoted to secondary processing, the blogosphere needs good information too. If you're actually close to a news story or know more about it than the mainstream press, blog it. If you come across someone who has blogged something like that, and it's not well known, link to it. Until one of those happens to me, I try to read English language foreign newspapers online and link to anything interesting. Blogdex is a great idea, people from Kuro5hin seem to be working together to get stories in the top 100 that really aren't that interesting.