Via Joshua Porter of Bokardo, here’s a fascinating post by James Corbett (EirePreneur) on social bookmarking and the semantic web. The basic premise is that our social bookmarking behaviour (e.g. on del.icio.us) exibits semantic characteristics that resemble the emergent intelligence in group organisms such as ant colonies. Or something like that. There’s a great line on teaching as well:

Teaching differs from simply broadcasting information in that the teacher must modify their behaviour, at some cost, to assist a naïve observer to learn more quickly…

…where in this case the teacher is an ant. But any help I can get in reminding me not to just broadcast information is help I’ll accept, even if it’s help from an insect. Corbett then carries out an interesting experiment with the grammar of bookmarking and OPML hierarchies, and ties in Steven Pinker via John Udall. Read and enjoy.