Such inadvertent order is the subject of Steven Johnson's book, Emergence: . . . . . discusses how large-scale order emerges from a series of small-scale interactions. Johnson chronicles a shift in thinking about natural systems, where older notions of explicit design and control were superseded by new thoughts on bottom-up decentralized methods. Furthermore, Johnson discusses how . . . . . people are taking an evolutionary approach to software development that often performs better than the best top-down designs.
   Web designers could benefit from such approaches. Typically, content is organized in a top-down hierarchical fashion. . . . . . . As these bodies of content grow, standard organization and presentation schemes become cumbersome in two ways. For content creators, the task of slotting and tagging this content is time-consuming and difficult to . . . ..
   This is where . . . . As centralized schemes grow unwieldy over time, it makes sense to create an alternative information environment where elements are organized according to a few simple rules about how users interact with that information. This leads to a fundamentally meaningful organization, because it's predicated on what people are actually doing. . . . . . . . . . FULL STORY »

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