Bottom-up Social Systems

While researching an upcoming talk about self-organizing social systems, I ran across this excellent article about the data-driven, bottom-up nature of today's social software. A good read.

I'm fascinated by the underlying dynamics of bottom-up, data-driven social systems, including:
1) decentralized (vs. centralized) control
2) member-created (vs. staff-created) content
3) statistical (vs. editorial) ranking & classification systems

As I look around the Web, I frequently see bottom-up dynamics in successful products. Google's success is based on leveraging social information in the form of links created by people, and it's flagship products are scalable, self-organizing systems. Blogs, Wikis and social network products like Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribes, Ryze, Spoke, etc. follow these self-organizing principles as well.

Links are the atomic units of the web - and leveraging links seems like a smart data-mining strategy for online self-organizing systems.