Paal Hivand asked a question on Twitter this week, which had me thinking about a recent conversation on ... eh ... Twitter. Thing is, Paal said (in Norwegian) that he was contemplating an article about how knowledge used to be individual, but now is social. I'm not going to go into that statement, just offer this anectdotal evidence for how knowledge in some respects is easier available than ever before (click on the image for a readable version):

I love Adriana's conclusion to my remark about what great lengths I'd go to dig out dusty old books on this particular subject some 16 years ago, whereas now it's all on Wikipedia:

"The remembered trivia one was so proud of now two clicks away! What is the world coming to -:)" I'd just jumped into a conversation between Adriana and Freecloud here - which started with the Albigensian crusade and ended with the Twitterian crusade - and it's also worth keeping in mind that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if it wasn't for Twitter...

Update 14:15: a_spod just reminded me of Google book search in the comments, which reminded me of this interesting article by John Naughton: "Google pays small change to open every book in the world"