Building up store of previously decentralized information used to be so expensive that only big organizations could undertake the process, and then only for important things -- phone books, driver's license records. And now it's everywhere. The NY Times today has a story on Mark Thomas, who has built, with distributed help, a global database of the locations and phone numbers of pay phones. It started as a quirky labor of love, but has since been used to find runaways, pedophiles, and stalkers, all of whom were relying on the unfindability of a payphone. Thomas built our first working server-push script (now _that_ dates me) for me back when I was PM of AGENCY.COM, Back in the Day, and started his pay-phone project shortly thereafter, and this is where it's ended up -- a single individual, linking ten of thousands of phone numbers to addresses all over the world _in his spare time_. And the Psy.geo.conflux is running a distributed camera-phone street game in NYC where participants send SMS challenges to one another to photograph some abstract thing ("Take a picture of something that tastes good next to something that tastes bad",) another project which would have been impossible two years ago and will be normal two years from now. The network doesn't just give individuals the power to distribute what was previously concentrated, but also to concentrate what was previously distributed...