The Wisdom of Crowds and Collective Intelligence are very useful concepts but not if they are used in the wrong places. Confusing these two concepts will only produce bad results for your groups and teams.

Read this book if your future is anyway connected to Web2.0. Andrew Keen’s central thesis is that if all content (e.g. music, video, news, books, encyclopaedias) is produced by “amateurs” and no-one will pay for “professional” versions then its curtains for quality or independent publishing.

A fascinating research report (April 2006) by Hans Geser of Zurich University on the use of mobile phones by pre-teens suggesting that they make a bigger impact on behaviour than previously thought and some surprising male-female usage differences.

Meaningfully engaging young people in the civic process is one of the biggest challenges for us all today. The UK Times reports on an idea which one UK Health Authority tried out which some would say is innovative but others would say its a total waste of public money. What do you think?

In this article I suggest that organizational teams, networks and communities who can adapt and adopt the “stop trying to control them” principle exemplified by nature's teams can achieve huge gains in agility and collective intelligence.

EMERGENCE. Biological experts discuss how Fireflies synchronize their flashing in an incredible way plus amazing insight into the discovery of Ant Pheromones from Dr. Edward O. Wilson himself.

Once upon a time there were three teams – an Indian Team, a Chinese Team and a Hungarian Team…..Very interesting observations by Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School on teams of software engineers in different countries.

With such an ever-growing list of collaboration platforms and applications of all shapes and sizes I thought it would be useful to gather together five of my favourite Collaboration Software Directories in one place.

Mindquarry (an Open Source Collaborative Software Supplier ) have developed a visual resource: Periodic Table of Collaboration covering 60+ elements over 4 categories: People (Roles), Productivity Software, Collaborative Software and Methods.

Harvard Professor, David Perkins, in his latest book, King Arthur's Round Table, discusses the importance of "organisational Intelligence" and how its absence leads to coblaboration rather than collaboration.