The trigger for this "sit-up-and-take-notice" phenomenon has been a recent announcement by an Amsterdam based company Eyebees. Eyebees made available a beta version of its product for public use. Eyebees is an IE plug-in which lets you become part of or lead a "swarm" of people surfing/navigating the Internet. Not only that the you will be able to see other "swarmers" but message them and see a visualization where every swarmer represents a blue dot.

In the words of Jack Bury - a 20 year old co-founder and the "in-house poet" at Eyebees: "The enveloping presence of thousands of minds, tracing across the Internet Sky in strange union—hissing and livid and one in censure of war—would be a conspicuous, awe-inspiring sight of this next social revolution taking firm hold."

With Eyebees, you can create a your own swarm , join a new swarm - and that too anonymously without parting even with your email address. You could also create what Eybees calls as a Metaswarm , a meeting place for people and other "swarms" interested in a particular topic. Conceptually, a Metaswarm could be a cluster of swarms belonging to a topic.

K-Praxis has been checking out the beta version of the software. And it looks like that Eyebees has a long way to go, but nevertheless, a step in a seemingly right direction.

Eyebees opens up new wave of information collaboration which will let you tap into a shared collective memory of information users. It also represents a practical-implementation-level attempt at translating a metaphor form biological systems into a piece of usable software - the name of the company, Eyebees, is telling enough.

The idea of information swarming is theoretically very similar to the idea of swarm-bots, there is a full-fledge EU funded project dedicated to Swarm Bots. The project focuses on developing technologies based on ideas like swarm intelligence - which in turn use, recent interests in the self-organizing and self-assembling capabilities apparent in colonies of social insects like bees and other animal societies.

With Eyebees and swarmbot based agents, and other tools like Quek the shared collaboration of the Internet knowledge space introduced by user-groups and later upheld by the blogging community, now could take new instaneous turn. One could see endless possibilities and a host of practical applications for this type of information sharing tool but hold on to your horses, it is important to be cautious about what a technology can do and resist the temptation of putting a cart before the horse, dictum to remember in these troubled economic times is that: when it comes to software think a hundred times before inventing a need .

To be continued....