joho and akma are talking about the web as a brain. I don't like this metaphor at all, partly because its like comparing the web to the interactions of quirks and quarks. We know almost nothing about either the brain or quirks and quarks. Still, their may be something to the comparison. Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg wrote an article in WIRED in 1995 on just this subject. The article compares Teilhard de Chardin's thoughts about the noosphere to the rise of new information technologies.

AKMA is interested in three things recently. Sermons and their repeatability, the director of american terrorism's new colour coded hype-building system, and the ability of wearable computers to determine context. These threads come together in dangerous combinations. After all, what is the colour coded hype-building system going to be good for if not to give programmers a cheat as they desperately try to teach computers to recognize context. If the contexts become colour coded then all the computer needs is a good digital camera and a pantone book. Perhaps the plagiarism of sermons isn't so bad; I would rather hear a good sermon twice than a bad sermon once. Perhaps sermons should be advertised by a colour coded system which would alert the hearer to the amount of repeated material.
Green - all new,
blue - joke repeated (i.e. that great baseball joke is in this sermon again),
yellow - unoriginal analysis but content is new (i.e. the whole Girardian analysis of violence thing will overwhelm the text again),
orange - massive plagiarism from another source (i.e. reading verbatim (or close to it) from AKMA's book),
red - its all been done before.

When I was doing more work on theology and new information technologies than I have time for now, I had a good discussion with the John McCarthy (my dissertation director) about the web and space. He found the ways in which computer games explode our notion of space interesting - supermario being an innocuous but good example. I think that the web has, or at least can have, some of the same thing going on. It is still mostly textual. But the little graphic bits we put on our sites at least hint towards a more richly varied navigation. My favorite metaphor would be a subway train. London's system would be a good one - you can get lost and whole parts of the city are unserved.