Blogs become a memory aid, a backup brain, if you will. A compendium of ideas and observation, some incomplete, others seeking connection, but they are snapshots day by day of our intellectual lives. So much so that a good practice is to review your posts. Look through the past month, the past quarter, the past year for patterns, for ideas you'd started to express that you can now finish, for rough ideas you can polish, for events and people and places that you'd forgotten were a part of your life. This introspection, this audit, makes you more aware of your progress through time, as a witness to your own life and as a critic of your own voice and perspective.

I've been blogging since 1998, more or less continuously. And those blogs are a legacy of my life and thought and expression since then.

But long before that, since Windows 3.1 days, I kept phone notes. Text files with names like "fn 19970423 Dad.txt". They are filled with often useless, context-free notes of the day, some transcribed from Post-Its and others written straight into Windows Notepad. Lots of phone numbers that ring to different people, lots of first names I can't recall, fragments of dialog that meant something at the time, and breadcrumbs to people who might have been colleagues, friends, family, or lovers.

And with mobiles and Skype, I spend more time in conversation than just about any time in my life.

Skype is helping a little bit.

Depending on my configuration, Skype keeps copies of my chat conversations. I can title text chats for better recall. And with one of the third-party plug-ins, I can record my voice calls.

I live with Skype running all the time so I want much more.

I want Skype to help me keep better notes.

• To keep more context of my conversations (date, time, full names, links to related conversations).
• To keep promises made.
• And promises kept.
• All the calls I make, even if they don't go through.
• All the voice mails I leave, even if unrequited.
• Every attempt by people to contact me, whether by chat or by voice or video.
• Any and all profile information available to me about my friends and all conversants, snapshotted over time - not just updated.
• And let me annotate transcripts and files with notes that aren't actually part of the chat transcript or audio in the call.
• Let me tag each conversation if I want.

And I want Skype to help me use those memories.

• To organize them, by date, by topic, by social distance, by social context.
• To search them.
• To bounce that data across other systems for enrichment, like looking up people in LinkedIn or syncing my Skype contact list with my Yahoo! and Gmail address books.

Memory is one of the elements of intelligence. By helping me understand and use my social interaction history, Skype makes me smarter. You amplify that intelligence by bringing that help to me at specific moments when I need it (when someone calls, when a contact or prior conversation is mentioned during a call, when citing a conversation in an email or a blog post or another chat). You help me manage myself by helping me see deep patterns

• in my relationships (this person was a close friend but you haven't talked with them in six months),
• in my behavior (you seem to call this person every Thursday before lunch),
• in my interests (you seem to be talking about Logitech a lot this month), and
• in my use of time.

Please: make me smarter.

Public conversations make the world smarter.

Blogs are one-to-many communication. My words, flung to the Internet. Scoured by search engines. Subscribed to or stumbled upon.

Skype conversations are mulitparty. It's the difference between a standup comic with a microphone and an improv troupe. Between an a capella soloist and a choir. Between a soliloquy and a play.

There is a conversation among bloggers, if you can call it that. Threads very loosely joined. I see something in someone else's blog and post a reply in mine. Mostly, though, blogs are monologous. Monoblogs, if you will. Masterblogtion, to be unkind. Conversations, like sex, are so much better when you're not alone. They have the gusto of interpersonal psychology. Dramatic structure. Clarification of thought. Action and reaction.

When we treat multiparty conversations as blogfodder, is it useful? Often. We see this, to a degree, in some of Bill Campbell's interviews. All parties consent, one party cleans up a conversation and publishes it. Then Skype Journal's readers become privy to heretofore private conversation. And they can capitalize on Bill's access and effort. Later, strangers will find it via Google, other bloggers will link to it (it now has a permalink), and that little talk is now history.

Does making private conversations public (some might call it publication) serve a public good? Build the creative commons? Yes, to the degree the conversation itself warrants it. The same logic that applies to blogging and podcasting applies here.

Some tools, like Pamela, make it easier to archive my conversations on servers by blogging the text chats and podcasting the audio ones. Few of my conversations are Google-worthy, let alone blogworthy, but some will be important for private family blogs and other conversations will be handy in private project and team blogs.

So the tools and personal incentives are coming together to make conversation sharing cheap, easy, fun, and rewarding.

Skype and others of its species approach a threshold moment, a tipping point, where their users may contribute more content to the searchable Internet than does the blogosphere.

For every voice chat I have, I have 10 text chats, so it won't take many Skypers publishing conversations to become a significant factor in search results.

As millions of conversations leave digital footprints, joining our collective memory organ, and as we choose to publish some of them the way we do blog posts, we'll see a new connective tissue emerge. A Technorati of dialog. A Google of conversations. So I can discover other people talking about the same local issues that I am. So I can join ongoing conference calls the way some people join a listserv thread.

And as our conversations enter the commons, we will be that much smarter, that much more connected, that much better informed about our world, our communities, and ourselves.