Self-organizing systems: what, how, and why?

I present a personal account of self-organizing systems, framing relevant questions to better understand self-organization, information, complexity, and emergence. With this aim, I start with a notion and examples of self-organizing systems (what?), continue with their properties and related concepts (how?), and close with applications (why?) in physics, chemistry, biology, collective behavior, ecology, communication networks, robotics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, social science, urbanism, philosophy, and engineering.

Infoenon — Where Information Meets Phenomenon

Search publisher-controlled information, public knowledge, and the open social web.

your long-form atmosphere · pub search

what you publish, who reads it, your semantic neighborhoods, and what you recommend

Landslide / Holdfast

Notes on what’s happening to our ability to collectively know things, and a look ahead to what this community is especially well positioned to do to support and revitalize our info ecosystems and the humans inside them.

Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed

As Google incorporates more artificial intelligence into search, people are spending more time on Google. Some website operators are crying foul.

Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed

As Google incorporates more artificial intelligence into search, people are spending more time on Google. Some website operators are crying foul.

Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence

Over the past decade, the rise of the Internet has enabled the emergence of surprising new forms of collective intelligence. Examples include Google, Wikipedia,

Everything is miscellaneous : the power of the new digital disorder

Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-257) and index; Prologue : information in space -- The new order of order -- Alphabetization and its discontents -- The geography of knowledge -- Lumps and splits -- The laws of the jungle -- Smart leaves -- Social knowing -- What nothing says -- Messiness as a virtue -- The work of knowledge -- Coda : misc; Philosopher Weinberger shows how the digital revolution is radically changing the way we make sense of our lives. Human beings constantly collect, label, and organize data--but today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Everything is suddenly miscellaneous. Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. He examines how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children's teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future.--From publisher description; From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think - and what you know - about the world. Includes information on alphabetical order, Amaxon.com, animals, Aristotle, authority, Bettmann Archive, blogs (weblogs), books, broadcasting, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), business, card catalog, categories and categorization, clusters, companies, Colon Classification, conversation, Melvil Dewey, Dewey Decimal Classification system, Encyclopaedia Britannica, encyclopedia, essentialism, experts, faceted classification system, first order of order, Flickr.com, Google, Great Books of the Western World, ancient Greeks, health and medical information, identifiers, index, inventory tracking, knowledge, labels, leaf and leaves, libraries, Library of Congress, links, Carolus Linnaeus, lumping and splitting, maps and mapping, marketing, meaning, metadata, multiple listing services (MLS), names of people, neutrality or neutral point of view, New York Public Library, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), order and organization, people, physical space, everything having place, Plato, race, S.R. Ranganathan, Eleanor Rosch, Joshua Schacter, science, second order of order, simplicity, social constructivism, social knowledge, social networks, sorting, species, standardization, tags, taxonomies, third order of roder, topical categorization, tree, Uniform Product Code (UPC), users, Jimmy Wales, web, Wikipedia, etc

Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment

Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was."

Community Search Engine

Boris Mann's digital garden and personal site.

Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse | The Walrus

As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

The rise of community-curated knowledge networks

The Internet put thousands of years of human thought at our fingertips, and enabled billions of people to create content. At least 2.5…

Global Search Engine Market Share in the Top 15 GDP Nations (2026)

While Google takes a large share of the global search engine market, there are other search engines like Bing and Baidu that capture their share of international SEO.

Join | Mozilla Data Collective

Mozilla Data Collective is rebuilding the AI data ecosystem with communities at the centre.

Join | Mozilla Data Collective

Mozilla Data Collective is rebuilding the AI data ecosystem with communities at the centre.