I saw a news story online recently that said watchmakers are scrambling because so many people use their mobile phones as their primary timepiece. I'll admit, I'm far less likely to wear a watch these days with the knowledge that my phone will pick up the slack.

So phones are taking over territory from watches. At the same time I think we are recovering territory from our phones, in the form of available memory.

In 1995, how many phone numbers did you have memorized? I'll bet that number has been cut in half, if not more by now. I've come so far as to get my list of memorized numbers down to a handful. At present I know exactly four phone numbers off the top of my head: my cell phone, the landline to my parents' house in North Carolina, the number of my cousin's house when we were kids, and 911. I can also remember a couple of prior iterations of my own cell phone number, but those are no longer valid, so I'm not counting them. Every other number I "have" is stored on a microchip.

What now lives in my memory in place of all those phone numbers? Hopefully something useful, like good memories, not more numbers.

My vote for the current most underrated web trick goes to Flickr's map feature, which uses Yahoo Maps' API to allow you to place all your photos on a map. Maybe it's because a few years in landscape architecture school taught me to think very spatially, but I have always been a little fascinated by maps and one's position in space.

Anyway, adding geotags to photos on Flickr lets you do some neat things, such as viewing a satellite map of where all your photos were taken (see below). As you can see, my recent photographic travel patterns seem to make an arc tracing the Blue Ridge mountains in North Carolina down to Georgia and over to the South Carolina Coast.

You can also pick a certain spot in the world, be it your house, the Statue of Liberty, or the Kremlin, and view any photos taken by Flickr members at that place. I found some cool photos taken near my house by other flickr members, such as this photo of a train in the snow (it never snows in Athens):

This is not a music review.

But you rarely get to find out what's coming out of people's headphones. However, I happen to know what at least a few Plexus employees have been listening to for the past couple of days. It's called In Rainbows.

It's significant because it is being distributed entirely over the internet (without the aid of a record company) by the band Radiohead, at a cost of whatever the listener decides to pay for the album. The website, www.inrainbows.com, allows listeners to choose between a high-quality digital download or a limited-edition discbox with a second disc of additional material(a marvel of graphic and packaging design, to be sure), to be shipped to their door by the 3rd of December. The discbox costs £40.00 ($81.36) and includes a free download.

The download by itself costs whatever you want to pay for it, allowing the consumer to set their own value on the luxury we know as recorded music.

Several of us at Plexus have gone to the site, named our own price for the album, downloaded it and listened to it. Whether the record is good is beside the point -- the point is that the internet yet again changed the way we as consumers did business.

Each of us decided what a new Radiohead album on our iPods was worth to us, and worked out a deal directly with the band, via their website. We paid in pounds Sterling with our credit cards, and the band didn't have to split any of it with the suits at the record label (Radiohead recently decided not to renew a contract with EMI Records and are essentially free agents at the time of the album's release).

How is it? This is not a music review.

It's a daring move, and probably best reserved for bands with established, loyal fan bases, which is exactly what Radiohead has. But it represents a kind of individual freedom and economic liberty that I think the world needs more of.

I therefore give them credit for setting a new standard for economic exchange between musicians and their fans, the artist and the consumer -- all made possible by one little website. It's not the first time they've been ahead of the curve: I just hope that this time they split some of what they make with the web developers who made it all possible.