April and I went to the Penn State football game today against Coastal Carolina. So this one will be quick because it's been a long day (which if you've been to a PSU game you can sympathize with). The first thing both of us did when we got seated was to pull out our iPhones and fire up Twitter. Every significant moment of the game was tweeted by at least one of us. And most of the updates were accompanied by photos. April was also texting her sister, who was camping (with her Blackberry), keeping her informed of score. In a very real sense, both of us were journalists, documenting an experience we knew would be relevant to our social network. This post isn't about Twitter, but the fact that this need to document and share our experiences is becoming so ingrained in our lifestyles that when we do something fun or interesting, we immediately think about sharing it. And we can do that because we have really tiny hardware, ubiquitous network access, clever software, and an active and attentive social network. This much is given, but I can't help but project into the future. We're going through a phase now where there's a lot of noise out there, and we're not all really good at filtering it. Or rather, the software isn't smart enough to help us filter effectively. But it will be. And micro-journalism will proliferate. Combined with the increasingly sophisticated way we describe the information we produce and the way we filter the information we consume, all perspectives on the world around us that are relevant to us will flow into our brains.

I do think filtering is the key to making this work though. We've got all sorts of tools to capture anything from quick thoughts to expositions, and text to video. But people need to know how to get to the relevant stuff, and that process needs to be intuitive and effortless. Taxonomies and folksonomies are only a very rough start.