Collaborative tagging sites like del.icio.us are examples of systems that harvest crowd intelligence. The collective behavior of thousands of people acting independently produces a solution.

It turns out that even though people are acting intelligently and independently, collaborative tagging behavior follows two simple rules: the rich get richer, i.e. more popular tags get more popular, and recent tags are picked more frequently than older tags.

Hmm. If something can be modeled it can often be reverse-engineered. So what happens when someone comes up with an algorithm that does “collaborative” tagging automatically?

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