"What the point here really is, is that we can do things with the social environment. This is now taking data from everybody- from the entire collective memory visually of what the earth looks like- and linking all of that together. All of those photos become linked together and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts. You have a model that emerges of the entire earth- think of this as the long tail of Steve Lawler's Virtual Earth work (see below for YouTube video of Steve Lawler's presentation)- and this is something that grows in complexity as people use it, and who's benefits become greater to the users as they use it. Their own photos are getting tagged with meta data that somebody else entered. If somebody bothered to tag all of these saints and say who they all are, then my photo of Notre Dame cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all that data, and I can use it as an entry point to dive into that space since that metaverse is using everybody else's photos using a kind of cross-modal and cross-user social experience that way. And of course, a bi-product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the earth collected not just from overhead flights and satellite images and so on, but from the collective memory."