Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web is an extremely interesting article by Joe Gregorio, author of Aggie, a .NET-based news aggregator.

Stigmergy, a term coined by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé… is interaction through the environment.

Self-Organization in social insects often requires interactions among insects: such interactions can be direct or indirect.

… Indirect interactions are more subtle: two individuals interact indirectly when one of then modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment at a later time. Such an interaction is an example of stigmergy.

…The World-Wide Web is human stigmergy. The web and it’s ability to let anyone read anything and also to write back to that environment allows stigmergic communication between humans. Some of the most powerful forces on the web today, Google and weblogs are fundamentally driven by stigmergic communication and their behaviour follows similar natural systems like Ant Trails and Nest Building that are accomplished using stigmergy.

This is required reading for any weblogger or user of Google.

A pity “stigmergic” is such a cumbersome word. Gregorio himself misspells it several times. Curiously enough, his article doesn’t allow trackbacks or comments… two of the important new stigmergic resources.

Thanks to Sam Ruby for the link!