As I was going through my blog reading this morning I found it very weird that I traveled halfway around the world and am having the exact same experience here as I have back in Redmond. Our world really has become as small as a conference room.

I was thinking about all the 747’s parked in Heathrow Airport and just how the introduction of commercial airplanes have changed our lives. If you wake up at about 5 a.m. you can see Boeing driving many of the parts of those planes up 405 by my house. If you ever come to Seattle you really should get a tour of the 747 factory about an hour north in Everett, WA. It’s amazing to think that those things are all built there.

But inside Heathrow you can see the other changes our society is undergoing. First of all, outside Heathrow is a huge sign advertising Wifi. Inside, even Google is now competing for your attention (I’ll check Google Space out on Monday).

It really is weird to be sitting in the UK, watching a video from Malaysia, while visiting Gabe Rivera’s servers back in Silicon Valley and reading Memeorandum. Imagine you lived 100 years ago and time-traveled to today. Would you be able to cope? I wonder how different the world will be 100 years from now. Will we recognize it?

Yet I’m reminded that about 5/6th of the world’s population has never been on a computer and the lack of wifi where I’m staying reminds me again that the neighborhood I live in is quite a bit different than most of the rest of the world (on the way to the airport I had my Tablet PC on and counted 20 Wifi networks, most of which were open, in just the few miles between my house and the freeway onramp that I use every morning to go to work — and that’s a low-density residential neighborhood).

Just some observations.