This happened back in December but in case anyone missed this (like I did) here’s an interesting story.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issued an open challenge: on December 5, 2009 at 10am ET they would raise one red weather balloon eight feet in diameter (see right)  in 10 random locations in the continental U.S. The first group to give the coordinates of all 10 balloons would win $40,000. The winners, M.I.T. Media Lab, found all the balloons in under nine hours. I’ve gone nine hours without being able to find my phone and they managed to locate 10 red balloons that could have been anywhere across the U.S. They did, however, have a lot of help. Check out this Scientific American article to see how they did it.

Basically, the internet, through all this social media like texting, twitter and facebook, is turning us into one giant brain. And when we use this huge brain in a coordinated way, we can do amazing things really fast. If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, you should check out what Clay Shirky has to say. And if you just like red balloons: