The flocking behavior of birds (schooling of fish, swarming of insects) have long intrigued and inspired scientists exploring the cybernetics of systems and how they can self-organize. While these ideas are frequently applied in artificial intelligence and robotics, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have devised a way of applying flocking to RSS feeds streaming through cyberspace, with similar content automatically grouping together. Explains the piece in New Scientist:
“When a new article appears, software scans it for words similar to those in existing articles and then files the document into an existing flock, or creates a new one. The team has used the system to categorise online news stories from CNN and the BBC. The next step will be to allow people to click on a bird to display its document.”