Blogs have brought us closer to the “Common Consciousness” concept. In the common consciousness world, people cannot get away with lies, murder, theft or anything because once someone figures out what you did, this knowledge propagates to other members of the social network – telepathically.

Okay, we’re not quite there yet, but here’s a famous example where a blog proved to be really useful. Sometimes, blogs can even help beyond the grave.

I personally think that blogs represent only the first step in the evolution of how people interact and how virtual social networks are formed. As blogs become more and more common and become easier to create, maintain and update (This is pure speculation, but I’m guessing it might be done in an automatic way, kind of like a human black-box), blogs will bring about a net improvement in how humans interact.

The reason why I’m writing all this is because, during several conversations with a good friend of mine, many times, he would ask me why I keep a blog. In fact, the whole blog phenomenon is very puzzling to him (although he’s a very technical person). It’s not the fact that people keep blogs that actually puzzles him, but the fact that most blogs actually have an audience, however small it might be.

So, I personally see today’s blogs as a starting point. Just like Pong marked the beginning of mainstream video games, today’s Blogger or Live Journal are starting points to a bigger social phenomenon to which we don’t have a good technological answer to as of yet: the drive towards Common Consciousness.