So, in re-establishing all of my contacts with the (digital) world, I noted the increasing similarity of the internet as it evolves to web 2.0 to a actual neural net. You may be reading this on my own blog, or you may be reading the RSS document that points back to where my thoughts are stored digitally.

You may see a video on Google video which lives on YouTube servers, or vice-versa. One news story published by a random source runs up through AP, to Google or Yahoo news, and out into the world. It never leaves it's home server, but the TAGS travel and mingle on the web.

This is, by my rough understanding, how parts of the brain work (if you believe in memory engrams.) One neuron fires, which "remembers" a specific piece of memory. Other neurons that have strong electrical connections to that neuron (from past firing as the same time) also feed their data, so you associate a name with a face, a smell with a meal, a date with an event. Now, the method I have always used to learn builds on that theory. The more points of data you can associate with an idea or a face or a name, the more chance that trying to recall ONE piece of information will lead to the whole web of associated data. I don't know what this is called, the closest thing I can come up with is Hebbian Theory.

Back to the Web now. If you can learn and remember better by making a group of strongly connected ideas that cross reference each other, web 2.0 technology should work the same way. I'm starting to play with this as I place tendrils back into the digital superstructure.

For example: old Web... You see an advertisement on a page, or do a search. You click on something interesting. That takes you to a commerce page where you can buy something. General data leads to more specific data. BUT THEN IT DEADENDS. That web site is the destination. To get more data, you have to go to ANOTHER website. The links might be there, but you have to exit the page to follow them.

Now, the NEW web... web 2.0... You find my YouTube site, It gets RSS from this blog. It links to Facebook. On this site, that youtube video sits in my blog, I'm working on a widget to get my deviantart.com gallery so you can buy right off this page. Same with twitter. same with any site I can post HTML.

From any location in the whole neuronal net, you can access the specific functions of the other (free) web locations. The more functional spaces you add into the net, the more likely someone will come looking for one thing, and find something else much more fascinating.

Just like the human brain. You tried to remember a phone number, but you also remember a name, an address, a conversation you had...

Definitely the next phase of marketing, going beyond viral. Information webs.