The Web as associative memory

Making sense of where we are heading... what does it mean, to have all of these people linked by wires? I recently hosted a reunion of my classmates from 1975 online, by blog, website and forum. We had met irregularly over 30 years, but now we leverage the INternet to stay connected - some of us anyway - on a daily basis. We have gathered as people, shared our memories and our photographs. It's a powerful example of how the word has become more connected, and quite humbling to think that one person could serendipitously have the skills to kick it off. In the future it will be expected that this is how it will be...

Just to expand upon this line of thinking, Jon Udell wrote this in his InfoWorld blog:

"I'm subscribed to hundreds of blogs, and I'm starting to think of the people who write them as a kind of neural network whose filters and amplifiers help me make sense of our increasingly complex information landscape.
But that's really just a metaphor. What actually happens is that I scan my feeds, absorb what I can, and bookmark what I might want to return to. Because I post my bookmarks to del.icio.us, and because other people do too, we have the beginnings of a shared memory. And because we tag our items, it's even a kind of associative memory. But del.icio.us only knows about the things we take the trouble to post and tag.
What if the entire blogosophere was, automatically, an associative memory? And what if the associations were driven by a combination of freetext and structured search? "

Bravo. Since 1995 I have been slowly leaking my entire life onto the Web. Carefully, judiciously. Increasingly others are sharing what they know and do, with me, with many people. And as the web grows and new tools emerge we see new possibilities for this network of online minds...