Do you know why human beings like sex, why dogs hump each other, why male pigeons bob and weave, courting a crack in the sidewalk? I do.

All the species that weren’t possessed of an over-the-top, redundantly expressed sexuality died out, that’s why.

Jerry Bowles’ response to Brian Oberkirch’s blog post about the ownership of “content” (God, I hate that word), is an example of a principle I am creating with my fingertips right now — the principle that ideas want to appear in many places. One could take it further and say that the better an idea is the more places it wants to appear, perhaps even the more responsibility we bear to make it appear in more places.

I’ve just been looking at my friend Jerry Michalski’s Google Reader shared items, his reblog as people seem to be calling this kind of thing. Google Reader lets you aggregate a bunch of feeds, format the content as if it were a single blog, and then “share it” — i.e. publish it at a publicly-accessible URL. Jerry’s shared item site doesn’t contain any ads, but you know and I know that Google is going to use these reblogs as places to post ads; if not today, wait until tomorrow.

Seems to me one could recreate any aggregation site, or a custom one, on one’s own — and then republish it (or refeed it to your own URL with your own advertisements). Ummm, the pillow fight’s in full force; I don’t think we’re going to get the feathers back in their pillows, do you?

Note that a reader can’t comment on blog posts in a Google Reader reblog, and that clicking on a post takes you to the site it came from. Moreover, given that the dust has settled between Jerry Bowles and Brian Oberkirch, please understand that I’m not writing to direct you to that tooting teapot (as I called it in a comment on Brian’s original post). I’m writing because of the principle I just created.

Redundancy is critical to the flow of ideas and the creation of knowledge. I think that it is a nice pair of glasses through which to view some core Enterprise 2.0 phenomena, in particular the value of tagging, which is a redundancy engine.

In fact, I’m so excited about my new principle, which I may call Let a 100 flowers bloom, that I am going to use this post to create a contest. I’m going to give a free t-shirt to the person who contributes the best Enterprise 2.0 example of “idea redundancy” and its value. Use comments to this post to suggest your ideas; the deadline is this friday COB.

(By the way — I have too many t-shirts any way; I’ll just pull some conference shirt from my drawer and send it to the winner. Don’t worry, I’ll wash and fold it first!)