I'm at the Microsoft Faculty Summit in Redmond, WA. We just heard a talk by Bill Gates on Microsoft Research, what they are currently interested in, and where the exciting MSR/CS challenges are over the next several years.
Along with a number of obvious candidates: Trustworthy Computing, Mobility, Terascale Computing, and Web Services, he also listed Social Computing, with IM and collaboration as examples. Some of the discussion was in terms of massively multiplayer games and virtual reality, but it is interesting to think about how close that is to issues faced in the NSDL. Maybe we should be thinking about the future of digital libraries in terms of a massively-multiplayer game or a virtual reality. Perhaps things don't have to happen in real-time, but the same dynamic of creation, collaboration, action, and organization may apply to both.
We may want to look into what is happening in the area of social computing to see if there is information that we can mine from that field.