Nadav at antenna has hit on a phrase I particularly enjoy:

"We have to find ways of inserting our personality into the cracks of the data structures."

He goes on to mention that our interactions online are increasingly based on the "voice of our online behavior." It's this kind of interaction - interaction based on a personality emerging from seemingly neutral data structures - that defines our experiences online. Just about every aspect of our new swarming media, of Web 2.0 applications, is centered on the idea that our data has meaning beyond the level of code. The data we enter on MySpace, when given in the context of a census, has no inherent value: age, location, gender, etc. Yet when we suddenly shove it into a social arena and make these neutral data interact with others' it becomed loaded with meaning.

We are not just inserting personality into the cracks of data structures, we are taking these data structures and making them into personality. We can even view blogging as a form of data entry: bloggers enter narratives from their day, reviews of products and services, and more. Google recognizes that this type of content as data with their "targeted" ads, and they are entirely correct. By blogging we are creating databases of personality, databases of identity, to be searched, scanned, and input. The extention to social bookmarking and any other Web 2.0 system can be easily seen.

We categorize ourselves and each other, but not only that, this categorization has become the very purpose of these media. This is classification-as-interaction. This is turning data into the personal in a way it has never been before. This is a process of dividing ourselves into ever smaller, searchable bits, then making these bits go out and bounce off others'.