The internet represents a distributed information gathering, storage and analysis tool of immense proportions yada yada. Cheap digital storage, the predominance of word processing and email and the arrival of digital photograph mean that truly substantial fractions of the human experience will become documented and potentially entwined in this internet medium blah blah.

We’ve heard it and thought it all before, since the frickin 80s. But as with most things, it’s all about scale and degree, and the degree and scale of this stuff is starting to get pretty extroadinary.

Have a look at this page, where flickr users (flickr is an online photo storage, indexing and searching tool) recount flickr-based coincidences. For instance, here are two pictures taken by unacquainted people of the two ends of the same rainbow (they are both lovely photographs by the way). There is also a guy who discovered after the fact (from posting on flickr), that he was trespassing in an abandoned building taking photos at the same time as some other guy was in the same building taking photos. One of them set off an alarm, they both assumed it was them and legged it.

Weeeeeeird.

Notice that in all these cases, the reasons the connections were made was because of people assigning good, comprehensive metadata to their files – airplane model and flight numbers, dates & times, street addresses etc. Tag your files people, tag your files. Magic accrues.