Swimming against the “blogs are exhibitionistic” tide, back in May last year Cory Doctorow described his blog as his outboard brain . This would be closer to the way I see my blog as well – a way of annotating the chaotic multimedia map that is my mind, and a way of forcing myself to distill (even temporarily) my thoughts and positions on things in a way that I could stand someone else to read. And it’s turning out to be more useful than my previous system, involving manic scribbles in my diary, on the backs of envelopes, and in the margins of whatever article I took home on the ferry that day. The “outboard brain” is also connected to other such devices (in theory, and sometimes in practice through comments and other forms of blogging dialogue). Which reminds me of the friendster as neocortical prosthetic thread of a week or so ago. Ever-decreasing circles is about right.