Maybe its just a fad, but suddenly people are spotting, and referring to, emergence, everywhere. (Maybe emergence is emerging, THEN what?)

And in the middle of it is the Internet which has become the preeminent tool for constructing alternative dialogues. Remember how, a few hard years ago, the Internet was going to be all about eCommerce? How the social, political, free wheeling Internet of the past was a dead letter? Now the money had arrived and it was going to shape this thing into a MARKETPLACE yeah, whatever. More evidence to the contrary from the NY Times.

How the Protesters Mobilized
...But the Internet has become more than a mere organizing tool; it has changed protests in a more fundamental way, by allowing mobilization to emerge from free-wheeling amorphous groups, rather than top-down hierarchical ones.

never mind the animated gifs and the Flash (TM) presentations, have a look at warblogs.cc.

As many have noted, including the preceding story on the anti-war organisational process, the Internet has played a significant role. One of the most useful tools has been the blog and the conversation between Blogs. Now, a group of Blogs with common course have decided to pool their resources and generate a, a what? A portal maybe, an online aggregator? Whatever you call it, it is bringing together the postings on the subject from half a dozen Blogs, providing headlines scraped from multiple sites by headline aggregator Newsisfree.com and other goodies.

If you want to know what web services might look like, this may be a good start. Blogs like Moveable Type enable postings to be categorised by the author, including easily into the RSS feed, most of the information needed to pull together appropriate material from participating sources.

What will it take before people with multiple interests join half a dozen aggregators who pull in only that material of interest to them. My wife, for example is a linguistics lecturer, teacher of speech pathology and has an interest in cross cultural communication. She, and her colleagues could happily post to their Blogs the material that interests them and the Linguistics aggregator will pull only the relevant stories into the mix it presents.

The add some tools on the front so users can, for their own purposes and the community benefit, rate both posters and the stories their post. Their customising of the view of the site will enable them to get from it what they want, but also enable others to see either a raw or rated view of all the content.

Neat stuff happening.