Collective intelligence is a broad term covering many cases where intelligence or novel information result from the collaborative activities of many individuals. Recent and well-known examples include sites like

• Wikipedia, where people work together to create encyclopedia-like content
• del.icio.us: i label (or ‘tag’) web page content, and others can look at my tags, or lots of people’s tags, to find things of interest.
• slashdot, digg, reddit, and similar sites that collect votes on the interest of web pages and then ranked the pages by popularity

Though more popular perhaps in the last few years, these kinds of approaches have been around for some time. Google’s dominance of web search, arguably the current “killer app” on the internet (along with email), comes from a kind of collective intelligence. Their PageRank algorithm uses the number of links to a page from other web sites to estimate how important the page is, and assign its rank in the results you get back from a web search.

The interesting question to me is how collective intelligence might be usefully applied to Biblical studies. There have been a few projects in this area, though i think it’s fair to say they haven’t yielded too much yet. I’ve written a few posts (here, and almost 2 years ago here) about applyi