Japan's 'most wired citizen', Joichi Ito believes the online community now has real power. Karlin Lillington reports.

"One of the things I've found is that people don't like to be compared to ants."

An appreciative ripple of laughter spreads through the small conference discussion session in Switzerland where Mr Joichi Ito is explaining why he is passionate - one might argue, obsessed - with what happens when you link together hundreds upon thousands of people over the Web to form vast, conversing communities.

What happens then, and what he hopes will happen more extensively, is a synergistic form of communication where the whole is greater than the parts. One could compare this - if, as Mr Ito acknowledges, people weren't getting so tired of the analogy out in the Web world - to the collective power of an ant or bee colony.

Instead, he calls this communications mesh "emergent democracy". There's no more vocal proselytiser for the notion, which he writes and speaks about on his weblog and Wiki (more about those in a moment) and at events across the globe with startling frequency.

If it's Friday, it must be Switzerland for the president and chief executive of one of Japan's more interesting venture capital and incubator firms, Neoteny. He was in San Diego at another conference right before, and after Switzerland, was back to Japan before Washington DC in July and who-knows-what in between.

Mr Ito is everywhere on the Web as well, a medium he confesses to immersing himself in for at least five hours a day. His main weblog, or blog - an online journal in which he comments on everything from new technologies to social theories to dinner parties - is the hugely popular Joi Ito Web (http://joi.ito.com/).

Indeed, the man many consider to be the most wired Japanese citizen often comments on the dinner parties while he is at them, just as he blogs live from conferences, or from Zurich airport just before he boards his plane. People can respond, posting public comments on his site. "I blog all day long," he confesses. "It's like a conversation that's continuous, not like publishing." He says he also regularly scans through some 900 other weblogs to keep up with what the rest of the Web world is saying.

But he also has a range of other Web presences. There's the Japanese version of his main weblog, and a variety of weblogs he maintains less frequently. Then, there's his Wiki - an oddly named communal weblog in which anyone can come in and edit or contribute to the content.

There, he posts ideas and others come in and copy-edit themor expand them. He's experimenting with a joint writing project on his Wiki (http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki) at the moment - a paper entitled "Emergent Democracy". He's watching other writers come in and transform it.

"Right now it says it's a paper mostly by Joi Ito. Eventually it will be, 'co-ordinated by Joi Ito', and maybe then, 'not by Joi Ito at all'." He grins. All the time, he has his computer screen projected large on a wall, and is flicking through his websites, clicking over to other weblogs, and trying to give his audience a sense of what he notes is a very "messy" online phenomenon. Weblogs have skyrocketed in popularity, leaping from a few hundred thousand in number two or three years ago to around three million now, he says. Four per cent of Americans regularly read weblogs for news, he adds.

Weblogs are central to his notion of emergent democracy. By their nature, they epitomise mass communication and networking. Webloggers (or 'bloggers') link to online news sources they find interesting, to other websites, to each other. They comment and dissect and sometimes rally together in numbers large enough to force through a desired action or reveal deception.

Mr Ito gives the example of racist comments made several months ago by American Senator Trent Lott that went largely unreported in the traditional media. Then webloggers picked them up and gave them wide publicity. The resulting media attention and public scrutiny forced Mr Lott to resign from his position as Republican leader of the US Senate.

He also points to the huge growth of blogs covering and arguing about the war in Iraq - the so-called "warblog" phenomenon. While the US media offered little analysis and often offered only one-dimensional stories, blogs - some directly from Iraq - encouraged mass discussion and debate.

That's emergent democracy, he says, and he wonders how best to support it. "How can you [use technology to] get this discussion, and engage the silent majority?" Weblogs and Wikis are one form of technology he is putting his faith in, but he says they are such a young communication form it is impossible to guess how they will evolve.

"With technology, people overestimate the short-term effect and underestimate the long term. Like with the internet. People thought we'd have a global vision but all we got is noise." So, rather than emergent democracy, one might get an emergent mob as millions take up blogging.

But for now, he's a dedicated blogger. "We're just trying to make it easier to communicate," he says of his life and work obsession.