Here's a small example in my day to day experience of how the evolution of the social Web can fuel collective intelligence. In the last few months I've been growing not only my own bookmarks on del.ici.ous, but also tapping into those from friends, colleagues and other trusted sources. Today, I quickly surveyed my contact network's latest bookmarks and spied one intriguing one from Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards, as well as an inspiring Executive 2.0 and fellow virtual worlds enthusiast.

I noticed one bookmark from Bob labeled: Avatar Reality, inc. A quick surf revealed that the company is working on an interesting virtual worlds effort called Project Blue Mars, "featuring stunning graphics, realistic characters and endless social bonding opportunities. Set on Terraformed Mars in the year 2177 AD, players will be able to live out their fantasies through personalized avatars. Blue Mars is scheduled for beta release at the end of 2008."

While this is a simple example of how all of us can become smarter than any of us, I also quickly discovered that Virtual World News had an update on the Blue Mars MMORG, from Wagner James Au via GigaOm, just a few days ago.

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