As your once and future agent will kindly tell you, 2005 will be remembered as the year that remembrance agents went mainstream.

This essay by Steven Johnson appears in the Sunday NYT Book Review.

If the modern word processor has become a near-universal tool for today's writers, its impact has been less revolutionary than you might think. The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn't yet changed the way we think.

The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me.

Tool for Thought, by Steven Johnson