The EirePreneur, one of my favorite bloggers from Ireland, conducted an interesting investigation in his post, “How Social Bookmarking can lead to the Semantic Web.” As he writes, “I decided to test what intelligence might be evident in the del.icio.us social bookmarking service.” From Steven Pinker (who I hate) to Steven Johnson (whose Emergence I still have to read), the EirePreneur does the theoretical thing, but then goes into del.icio.us and gets his(?) hands dirty. He looks at the common tags for a web page that he has never heard of or visited. From those tags, he tries to create a working definition of the given page (using Pinker’s observation about how a pidgin becomes a creole). Then he checks the page to see if he is right. He tried it twice, and as he writes, “The definition was almost exactly as predicted…No one has explicity posted to del.icio.us the specific definition…but the army of tagging ants [language he takes from Steven Johnson] have generated it with their collective intelligence.” He concludes that we’re only a few steps away (and he gives those steps) from the Semantic Web. The interesting thing is that the Web doesn’t “upgrade” to the Semantic Web via some massive, organized effort, but rather, it emerges through the collective action of the users.