<sillygwailo> I love that how sometimes we see stuff and we think "oh man that reminds me of a weblog post from a year ago!" -- Richard

Like discussions on IRC seem to inevitably do, the subject of conversation had turned to nipples, and the merits thereof. This reminded me of an old post by Warren Ellis about how Batman should just rip the Joker's nipples off, which is especially memorable for containing the immortal line: "Choke on my fuck, Commissioner Gordon."

Which, of course, led to the quote at the top of this post.

This is one of the cool things about having read blogs for a while. There's a hell of a lot of them, and they cover topics from why PHP sucks to fish with OCD. After a while you get this cloud of references in your head, which gives you the ability to page-slap something pithy or informative on a wide variety of subjects.

It's the page slap that does it. Before the web, if you'd read something interesting, the most you could do was say "Hey, I read something interesting about that. I should dig it up and lend it to you", and then forget, because you're too busy doing 10,000 other things. Now you can have the original at hand in a few moments. Blogs are semi-permanent records, so it's very easy to dredge up a reference from just a vague memory of who said it, and what they might have said. All you need is a good search engine and you're away.

Which justifies the description of blogs as outboard brains -- we can store vague metadata in our heads, and trust the blogosphere to fill in the details on demand. But they can also be a collective consciousness, this cloud of memes.

And we take it all for granted because at the same time, it's really just a bunch of self-important nerds shouting into the void.