Which of these activities occupies more of your time: foraging for food or surfing the Web? Probably the latter. We're all informavores now, hunting down and consuming data as our ancestors once sought woolly mammoths and witchetty grubs. You may even buy your groceries online.

"No central authority has cultivated the Web as a beautiful garden," said Dr. Bernardo Huberman, an Internet ecologist at Xerox PARC. "It grows on its own like an ecosystem." Informavores hunting down an interesting site link it to their own, and that site is soon linked to others, forming a vast spider web of connections.

Zenon Pylyshyn of the University of Western Ontario's Centre for Cognitive Science closed the conference with an apt description of homo sapiens in the information age - Man the Information Processor, or Informavore.