The commercial advantage

Although there are a number of additional extras that could be added (such as making provisions for privacy and keeping out spammers), the great advantage of this stigmergic system is that it costs relatively little to set up and maintain. Not only this, the development costs would be minimal because exactly the same system of basic components could be used for a large variety of quite different situations where it would be useful for people to make contact with others. It is like a spread sheet, the starting position is a grid of empty spaces. Any system can be created simply by labelling some of the spaces and devising an appropriate questionnaire.

For instance, the job seeking example could easily be used by large companies to fill vacancies within their organisation. It could be used to make optimum use of sub contractors and consultants. It could be used to leverage the use of specialist employees, allowing them to be work in various different parts of the business as and when they are needed.

The system could also be used in specialty areas of interest. For example, gardening: where gardeners could be put in touch with others who share a particular interest in a specific type of horticulture. Seed merchants and specialist gardening services could set up such systems to gain good will to help them sell their products.

It could be used in all kinds of ways to bring people together for the purpose of collaboration or information sharing. It could be used in education, to put students in touch with suitable courses of study.

Particularly, it would be a useful organisational structure to create areas for micro money trading. So far, very little use has been made of the ability of the Internet to reduce transaction cost to practically zero. Given a low cost infra structure, such as can be provided by a stigmergic structure, "penny bazaars" can be opened – where a variety of software components, MP3 files, tutorials, specialist information, etceteras can be traded for pennies.

It wouldn't be viable for a single small trader to set up a Web site to trade in items selling for pennies , but, collectively, many coming together within a stigmergic organisational structure could attract millions of visitors - enough to provide many small businesses with substantial remunerative cash flows.

It may seem to go against the grain, charging money for small software applications, music clips, tutorials and information. But, the originators of these kind of products are the people we need to support. A few pennies appreciation for their efforts, given by many thousands of people may enable them to work on their creations full time. Let's support the small artisan. It is the only way we can prevent the Web being dominated by large companies.