It turns out, then, for me at least, that reading about someone's cat and what they ate for breakfast and seeing their Flickr photos of the swirls in their coffee and all that adds up to a picture of a person in my mind; not a full likeness, but enough for an actual presence in memory; and with that picture, I associate the things they tell me with them, and remember what they say surprisingly well. Far better than my memory usually works, unattended.

That's the only excuse I need!

It turns out, then, for me at least, that reading about someone's cat and what they ate for breakfast and seeing their Flickr photos of the swirls in their coffee and all that adds up to a picture of a person in my mind; not a full likeness, but enough for an actual presence in memory; and with that picture, I associate the things they tell me with them, and remember what they say surprisingly well. Far better than my memory usually works, unattended.

That's the only excuse I need!

The web is always been poised to grow. (Duh.) And as a second order effect the amount of information available through feeds seems likely to overwhelm the casual onlooker despite its being potentially useful for them. A (currently) smallish cross-vendor community has been adept at making tools for managing this incredible volume of data available for everyone for years and at Google we're interested in helping out with the resources available to us.

More later. There's a little bit of digital soup being thrown at the newborn. So many people... so many people at the same time...

That is why we have launched a new feature on the Blogger Navbar called Flag As Objectionable. This feature allows the blogging community as a whole to identify content they deem objectionable. Have you read The Wisdom of Crowds? It's sort of like that. For more information on how this feature works, read What is the "Flag" button?. (Note: a blog has to be republished in order for this new button to show up in the navbar.)