Thinking alike, separately

Curiously Shawn just posted this: Anecdote: Collective meaning and group decision making. Given its similarity to my recent post on collective decision making I asked him if he'd seen my post. He hadn't but concluded that when interesting books like Wisdom of Crowds appear it starts people thinking in a certain direction. I'm sure this happens with many ideas. It seems a related phenomenon to 'aggregated, non-interactive' decision making, but instead of a decision it's the spontaneous distributed emergence of an idea or distinction.