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In fact, judging by Twitter’s Trending Topics, the re-tweeting process does not point to either good, or important content. Of course, it may not be right to assume that a global brain will be smarter, and real significance will be lost in the tsunami of celebrity drivel.Amplify’d from docs.google.comBut recent evidence in neuroscience shows the truth is actually an interested twist on this idea - a twist that could have important implications as a model of how global consciousness could emerge from real-time social media like Twitter.In reality, synapses are modified according to a rule called Spike Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP).   In a nutshell, STDP says that if two neurons fire (= spike) in rapid succession, the  connection from the one that fires first to the one that fires second will be strengthened.users could be automatically steered towards following folks who are the first to post content that will interest them - towards those who are considered the ‘thought leaders’ you might say.  And content creators who work hard to be the first to find and tweet interesting content will be rewarded automatically with a growing list of followerscontent generators on Twitter will compete to be the first to create good content or break important news

The yellow-handled hammer, which the eBay CEO purchased at Home Depot using PayPal, signals that the company’s plans for entering the mobile payments business has entered the construction phase.

The company also announced fourth-quarter results yesterday, solidly beating both the company’s internal guidance and analyst expectations. One of eBay’s big initiatives over the past year has been to find ways to work more closely with physical retailers by providing them with the technology they need to operate more efficiently online and offline. Over the past year, that has included buying 13 companies, for a total investment of $3.4 billion.

“We are right at the intersection of something that’s really cool,” Donahoe said. “This isn’t something that everyone sees, like social networking three years into it, when only the early people knew about it.”

This weekend in Amsterdam you may see a whole bunch of people waving their smartphones around at once. It’s the first social net/augmented reality flashmob, aka a fabulous way to combine three novel Net memes into one event.“Every square in every major city in the world knows the ‘human statue’ phenomenon,” he notes, so the intention of this weekend’s performance art is to take the human statue game totally into the digital world.have a smartphone that’ll run Layar (i.e. one with GPS).activate Layar, wave your smartphone in the air and ogle whatever strange and wonderful digital statue installations Veenhof’s chosen to populate the augmented space over Dam Square with. There’s a rumor that the Beatles will be showing up in pixel form, to recreate their famous Abbey Road pose.Is this the start of a new trend? You betcha. Flashmobs are still a popular affair, and AR is a tech that’s on the point of exploding into the mainstream public consciousness.

Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?

Facebook isn’t the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we’re stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They’ve accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn’t initiate it.

The modern temper runs toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility, the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal, improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever we want, however we want, for as long as we want.