Measuring diversity of expressed thought in the blogosphere

Interested

• Paul Dwyer pauldwyer at tamu.edu

Concept

In the wake of Dr Page's first lecture I'm left wondering: How can we be sure we have enough diversity in any collective intelligence situation to ensure we will get good insights or decisions?

One area where this might be studied is in the blogosphere, the collection of all blogs. A blog is a website where an author posts content and readers write comments or link to the post in their own blogs. The author's act of posting is an invitation for distributed computing in the form of people thinking about the post. Some interested readers will self-select to share the results of their thinking by writing comments. How do we know if the diversity of expressed thought in these comments reflects the thinking of the larger world? Can we measure the diversity of expressed thought and statistically infer its diversity?

I think ABM can be used to simulate the blog as a cognitive space and the actions of agents (author and commenters) in it. What are the attributes of intellectual content that readers might perceive and perceive differently? Are the author's post and reader comments cognitive "attractors" that affect the positioning of future comments in the space?

Can we use data from this simulation space to derive a cognitive diversity metric or set of metrics that could be used in the real world?