As we become more connected in our daily lives we are going to become more dependant on online cognitive models. These online cognitive models will become our primary conduit for knowledge. Today the primitive online cognitive models consist of a composite sets of applications, their rules and their data. The applications range from email to our cell phone, all providing some mechanism for us to be attentive to information. The models today stop short of proxying our understanding of the information. We are still faced with internalizing almost all the information we receive and then formulating some understanding. As that happens we will be forced to create mechanisms to maintain our situational awareness, and at the heart of that awareness will be our online cognitive models.

The models enabling situational awareness may be capable of representing our understanding and acting on that understanding. This may all occur beyond our site based on rich collections of attention/gesture data and rules. I think of email filter rules, pop-up and download permissions and IM presence rules as just the first step in creating the building blocks of composite online cognitive models.