Steven Johnson promotes the idea of the web as mind space in a recent Wired article:

What happens when you start seeing the Web as a matrix of minds, not documents? Networks based on trust become an essential tool. You start evaluating the relevance of data based not on search query results but on personal testimonies. ("This page is useful because six minds I admire have found it useful.") You can research ideas or breaking news by querying the 10 people whose opinions on the topic you most value - what Cory Doctorow calls an "outboard brain." A tool recently created by Dave Sifry of the blog analysis site Technorati lets you take any URL and automatically generate a list of bloggers who have commented on it. Almost anything you stumble across can be filtered through the perspective of other bloggers.