Today's Salon has a very interesting article about the possible future of blogging by Steven Johnson.

When I read this, I remembered a somewhat less-sophisticated attempt at this sort of thing which was developed by the nanotechnology think-tank The Foresight Institute.

Their "Crit" program (http://www.foresight.org/WebEnhance/index.html) is more of a server side approach, which makes it prone to bottlenecks, but it ought to be possible to do something similar using a client-side or even peer-to-peer model. Considering the volumes of data that are being thrown around on P2P networks these days, and the popularity of distributed.net style screensavers, why not make a distributed web directory?

GNUgle, anyone?