Does the Web learn? (revisited)

Continuing my thoughts from yesterday: I asked what the difference was between an Open Directory category and, for example, a city district with shops of a particular niche. As I continued to read Emergence, I started to think that Steven Johnson perhaps thought that this wasn’t an example of unconscious self-organization: compiling a directory listing or forming a web ring is a conscious attempt to aid visitors, while cities emerge without any such awareness.

In the following pages, Johnson writes about Alexa and its browser toolbar that, over time, learned the patterns of people navigating the web, and for each visited URL proposed a number of related sites. Compiling a list of sheet-music sites is not only a conscious action, but also trivial compared to this. Let’s say an overwhelming majority of people, after having visited the website for the Guggenheim Museum felt a strange urge to go shopping for kit cars. Then perhaps it’s likely that the next virtual Guggenheim visitor feel the same urge?

Clearly, this is emergence. And I agree with Johnson that the architecture of the Web does very little to facilitate this emergence. But then again, I’m not sure that the Web architecture should be so much smarter. Perhaps an evolution like Google’s or Alexa’s – that is, services that build on top of the Web architecture – is the only there can be? How do we anticipate all possible evolutions? Isn’t it better for the Web architecture to ignore its above layers?

Then I thought about the weblogging community and the seeming urge to find your neighbors. Some think that the weblog neighborhood is constituted of all the blogs that have your blog on their blogroll. Myself, I’m of the opinion that the blogs that link to the same URL’s as my blog does (news articles, books at Amazon, etc) are part of my neighborhood. They are bloggers that like to point out and comment on the same things as I do. If they point to something that I don’t, perhaps that’s something of interest to me and to those who enjoy reading Tesugen.com?