Cory Doctorow's been blogging from the PC Forum, including these interesting notes from the Social Software panel. I've been following social software development because it offers so much promise for creating the kinds of environments that enable creativity.

From Cory's notes, here's Meg Hourihan on the accidental way in which Blogger was created:

When Pyra started, there were only two of us in my living room, but we still couldn't communicate, because we would have ideas at different times, and email just went into a black hole. So we came up with a weblog, and we used to communicate internally, and we called it "Stuff." Quickly it became special. Our next employees became embedded in that space. We got a feeling that others would like it, and we thought we could release it as a product to get people interested in our real software, a project-management app.

Ross Mayfield of SocialText on wikis:

Wikis enable happy accidents through forward links -- if we use the same term to describe "presentation" the wiki will merge our pages about "presentations," creating emergent vocabularies. The best experts rise organically to the top through lightweight collaboration.

A terrific demonstration on the creative value of social software can be seen on SocialText's site, where there's a PC Forum wiki and a trackback metablog that compiles all the blog posts that have been made on the PC Forum.