So, The Diamond Age. Lots of cool nano/information technology hypotheses. At one point a character Hackworth becomes part of a "computer" himself by way of nanotechnology. I'll let Wikipedia summarize:
Upon his arrival in North America, he had been led to an underwater system of tunnels, the abode of the "Drummers," a society whose life consists of drugged trances accompanied by drumbeats. The nano-particles that induce the ecstatic trances actually carry bits of information among the individual Drummer's brains to form an immense network of human thinking capacity that—-if used to such purpose—-would exceed the capabilities of any existing computer system.
Basically these people have nanites attached to their brains that transmit information to local Drummers and influence the person's actions. In this way the people form a network. Inside their veins run other nanites that themselves perform computer-like calculations via rod logic, each one technically a supercomputer. These allow the human network to run computations alongside their brain's own uniquely organic ones. The result is one huge computer not only with immense computational power but also the approach of a nonsynthetic organism. In the story, the "social network" is used to find the enormous prime numbers used as the keys in decryption. Take that, SRA.
Anyway, relevance. Web 2.0, among many things, touts its ability to place the work behind a web site upon the shoulders of its users. The way I see it, there are two basic types of web sites: those with static and those with dynamic content (duh.) The general trend has been away from companies producing the dynamic content, the reason for people to come back to a site again, and towards making those very same users do the work. Tagging, in example. Now of course we do not have the technology to combine human minds as we do in networked computing, nanites and nanites that can interface with our brains being years ahead. I'm not even sure if people would volunteer for that sort of thing. Tagging resembles more the processes of archiving and upkeep that plague corporations so.
Now relevance for realz. Second Life is enormous, being over 80 square miles in size as of late 2006. No corporation could set out to manufacture such an environment. No sane corporation I guess I want to say. It's Second Life's reliance upon its citizens that makes it a viable metaverse. Annnnd that's where I'll leave off, because the next post is going to be just as big. Hopefully I'll wrap my thoughts up.