Business Week carries an interview with Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Rheingold is developing his ideas further now by delving into weblogs, open-source software development and Google, looking at them as a sort of "collective action...in which the individuals aren't consciously co-operating".

Google is based on the emergent choices of people who link. Nobody is really thinking, "I'm now contributing to Google's page rank." What they're thinking is, "This link is something my readers would really be interested in." They're making an individual judgment that, in the aggregate, turns out to be a pretty good indicator of what's the best source.

Then there's open source [software]. Steve Weber, a political economist at UC Berkeley, sees open source as an economic means of production that turns the free-rider problem to its advantage. All the people who use the resource but don't contribute to it just build up a larger user base. And if a very tiny percentage of them do anything at all -- like report a bug -- then those free riders suddenly become an asset.

(Via Future Now.)