I spend a lot of time searching the web for what is happening. I often check out Technorati to see what the top ten searches are. Yesterday and today, Kielle was a top search topic. SF Site reports “Kelly Eileen O’Guinn (b.1972) died on September 22. Known as Kielle, she was diagnosed with colon cancer four months ago. She was active in web-publishing and role-playing fanfic.”

There are wonderful tributes to her around the Internet. Years ago, I took an online class, Grief in a Family Context. It was one of the best classes I ever took. It seems as if there is room for lots of research in how people process grief, especially as we all become more interconnected via the Internet.

Meanwhile, reading Jon Lebkowsky’s weblog, I find a reference to a plague that has struck World of Warcraft. He points to a blog entry by Joi Ito and a story by the BBC. There are discussions going on about how these virtual societies deal with something like the outbreak of a plague. It made me think of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. People have talked about how the online plague relates to what is going on these days with the avian flu and how society is responding to Katrina.

One final data point: I wrote a blog entry for Blog For America about the march in Washington on Saturday. After the march, there was a bar-be-que for people from DFA at the house of ‘Hypatia’. Many of the people who went to the bar-be-que had known each other through the blog, but not met face to face. I had never met Hypatia. Using DFALink, I communicated with her about the bar-be-que. Afterwards, I found that she sings in a group called Watermelon Sugar. They get their name from the great book, In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. It was a favorite book of mine years ago.

I listened to some of their music online and really liked it. They sell their CD on CDBaby, which is a site I had heard about quite a while ago. CD Baby is a cool site where independent musicians can sell their CDs directly without a record deal, and since there isn’t a record company as the middle man, the musicians get a much larger cut. You should check out CD Baby and Watermelon Sugar.

The Internet is changing the way we interact in a lot more ways than people realize. We should pay close attention to these trends.