Indirect Reciprocity, Assessment Hardwiring, and Reputation, A Talk with Karl Sigmund

The Edge has an interesting interview with Austrian Mathematician Karl Sigmund on the topic of indirect reciprocity — giving something back not to the person to whom you owe something, but to somebody else in society. I really enjoyed Sigmund’s book Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and behavior which is an accessible and very enjoyable introduction to many topics surrounding models of cooperation and competition and how they develop. Unfortunately, the 1993 book seems to be out of print.

ClickZ’s The Blogosphere By the Numbers discusses trends identified by several companies and projects.

According to David Sifry, Technorati‘s chief executive, the current number of blogs is now over 8 times bigger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003. The company tracked 3 million blogs as of the first week of July, and has added over 1 million blogs to its stable since then. Meanwhile, Pew Internet & American Life reports a new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds. That roughly translates into 15,000 new blogs every day.

The article also points out that blog traffic spikes when certain “web communicable events” occur — like the Howard Dean scream and the Kryptonite lock debacle.

I stumbled across this term at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab web page. Not reading carefully, at first I thought it was a group working on Pervasive technology. But no …

The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab creates insight into how computing products — from websites to mobile phone software — can be designed to change what people believe and what they do. Like human persuaders, persuasive interactive technologies can bring about positive changes in many domains, including health, business, safety, and education. With such ends in mind, we are creating a body of expertise in the design, theory, and analysis of persuasive technologies, an area called “captology.”

B. J. Fogg, the man behind this group, seems to have coined the term. He’s interested in exploring how all kinds of computing technologies, from kiosks to web pages to mobile phones, can be designed to motivate and persuade people, especially for good, e.g., encouraging healthy living or safe driving. A related project is the Web Credibility Project which studies how people evaluate a web site’s credibility.

Captology obviously has a dark side too. Google turned up an apparently related term captation which in French law has the following definition :

CAPTATION – French Law. The act of one who succeeds in controlling the will of another so as to become master of it. It is generally taken in a bad sense. Captation takes place by those demonstrations of attachment and friendship, by those assiduous attentions, by those services and officious little presents which are usual among friends, and by all those means which ordinarily render us agreeable to others. When those attentions are unattended by deceit or fraud they are perfectly fair, and the captation is lawful; but if, under the mask of friendship, fraud is the object and means are used to deceive the person with whom you are connected, then the captation is fraudulent and the acts procured by the captator are void.

That sounds a lot more like an all too common commercial (and political) approach to persuation.