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Want to know the next big thing? After Twitter and location-based services, it's going to be re-blogging.

Have you been reading your little sister's re-blog? Or her friends' re-blogs?

By allowing re-publishing and commenting with as little as a single click, Tumblr is letting people feel ownership from what is largely curation. I do it a little with delicious and Google Reader, but these girls are doing it voraciously with re-blogging of photos and quotes.

And why not? Although I think technically this is done pretty poorly (copies of things leads to all sorts of problems and I already have a lot of issues with Lynn's friends and trying to track down the original of anything, since it may be several links deep), but the basic idea is smart. Everyone should be out there curating the web, not just a couple of big-name bloggers like Kottke. Add your comments and then (once the technical challenges are solved) compare your comments to everyone else's. Start a conversation on top of the web instead of in it.

Paragraph fingerprinting (CMU) and quotation finding (Google) are some techniques to bolt this on to existing practices. That might be more pragmatic than the Xanadu-style alternative. But I think an enhanced Delicious is where it's at (URLs as actual universal resource locators) -- it's just a question of who gets there first.