We've lived so long under the notion of the Web as a space of connected documents, it seems almost unthinkable that it could be organized any other way. But it could just as easily be assembled around a different axis: not pages but minds.

The explosive growth of blogging is creating the opportunity to do just that. Hundreds of thousands of individuals now maintain their own weblogs, updating them regularly with links, commentary, and personal anecdotes. There are some wonderful group weblogs, to be sure, but the general principle of blogspace is one per person. Following a well-maintained, up-to-date personal blog is – short of shacking up with someone – the most efficient method yet invented to keep track of what's going on in another person's head over extended periods: what they're working on, linking to, obsessing about, listening to, reading. On a day-to-day basis, I am more intimately aware of the latest happenings in the world of my 10 favorite bloggers than I am of what's going on with my closest friends. And of those 10 bloggers, I've met only two or three in person. As one of them, Rael Dornfest, likes to say: "Following someone's blog is like doing a TiVo season pass for a person."

Of course, changing the organization of the Web makes it possible – even imperative – to build all sorts of new architecture inside that space. Blogs themselves are a kind of secondary effect of the Web's original hypertextual space. If you create an environment of linked documents, then a whole new type of document becomes possible: one that does nothing but link.

What happens when you start seeing the Web as a matrix of minds, not documents? Networks based on trust become an essential tool. You start evaluating the relevance of data based not on search query results but on personal testimonies. ("This page is useful because six minds I admire have found it useful.") You can research ideas or breaking news by querying the 10 people whose opinions on the topic you most value – what Cory Doctorow calls an "outboard brain." A tool recently created by Dave Sifry of the blog analysis site Technorati lets you take any URL and automatically generate a list of bloggers who have commented on it. Almost anything you stumble across can be filtered through the perspective of other bloggers.

Your mind becomes a part of the space as well. Your own personal site becomes an extension of your memory, as in Vannevar Bush's vision of the Memex, but your memories also become part of the Web's collective intelligence. (See the brilliant site Random Access Memory, which organizes thousands of specific remembrances contributed freely by individuals.) And a Web oriented around connected minds makes it easier for those minds to find one another in real life: Witness the recent success of online personals and Meetup.com.

Ever since the Web entered the popular consciousness, observers have noted that it puts information at your fingertips but tends to keep wisdom out of reach. In a space organized around connected minds, however, the search for wisdom becomes more promising. The Web remains a space of functionally infinite data, but that space is increasingly mapped by human minds, linked in ways we're only beginning to imagine. If it's wisdom you're looking for, you couldn't hope for a better guide.