Washington slept here, and so did I.

I'm still in New York City on vacation, although it's a bit of a busman's holiday, what with all the museum-ing and theater-going I'm spending all my time doing. That, and remembering how to use the NYC subways to do something besides get to Yankee Stadium.

We went to the Transit Museum this morning, practically right next to my hotel in Brooklyn. It was an interesting study in a certain type of museum, one that tells a story with lots of blown-up archival pictures with white text overlaid on the photos, or alongside on the wall. There were a few attempts to make the exhibits interactive, mostly aimed at teaching kids lessons about the science of combustion engines, and the impact of exhaust on global warming, but for the most part it was pretty static.

And don't get me wrong -- I loved it. Especially walking in and out of and sitting down in and holding the leather straps of the different trains from 1914 on up to the present day. I am nothing if not a sucker for history. But it made me think about the growing movement to build museum exhibits in ways that engage the audience not just as recipients of information, but as information generators as well, building a conversation that the museum doesn't necessarily orchestrate and define as much as facilitate and encourage participation in.

It's funny how when you start thinking in terms of social networks and user-generated content, you just see the potential applications everywhere you look all of a sudden. It's like that time when I bought a Volvo station wagon and suddenly it seemed like the streets were just filthy with Volvo station wagons, and how had I never noticed that before?

A museum dedicated to the New York City mass transit system would be a no-brainer for this kind of approach, it seems to me. As we walked through the exhibits, my husband and I remarked on different token and train designs, saying this one is the one I remember from visiting my grandfather in Queens when I was growing up or this is the type of train I rode when I visited my first serious boyfriend, who lived in Brooklyn...

This made me think about the presentation I recently saw Jake Barton give at TiTA. He gave a quick overview of a project his company did called Memory Maps, which involved a large blow-up of the New York City street map, and simply giving viewers small scraps of paper to write brief messages onto, which they could then post on the location where that memory happened. Really low-tech, and really powerful in how it gives the power of storytelling back to the people.

It struck me then that this was a sort of micro-history telling -- the slips of paper were necessarily small, so people had to choose their words well. And, of course, one is presumably able to be as cryptic as one wants -- you can either write my mother died in a car accident at this intersection and I haven't walked through that block in the twenty years since or simply Mary, rest in peace.

Not sure where that came from. Being in the city these last few days have suddenly revived the fiction writer in me. Haven't heard from her in a long time.

I wonder if you could do something online with a mash-up of twitter and Google maps, with the result a series of maps -- on a neighbohood scale, I suppose -- with mouse-overs that gave little-ups of micro-stories. If you wanted, you could write the whole thing out in a longer post that the micro-post could link to.

This is like a collaborative version of the tour of my hometown I have given countless boyfriends and houseguests over the years -- I have a habit of driving people around saying things like and this is where I took ballet until the teacher said I was too heavy for pointe shoes and this is where my brother wrecked my mother's car the night before my high school graduation and other fascinating tidbits.

And I imagine that everybody has these little guided tours in their heads, even if we never share them with others. They make up part of our inner monologue, or serve as a faint, thrumming soundtrack to our daily lives.

How great would it be to share those? Or at least the edited, the funny, the universal?

How great would it be to go on vacation, like I am on vacation now in Brooklyn, and be able to open up a map of the neighborhood and hover my mouse over a nearby streetcorner and see what happened there? Not on a bronze plaque, but on a personal note, told by the person who remembers it best?

Or what if I wanted to enter a search term, and see where the most proposals of marriage happened in this borough? And where did the most break-ups happen? And how has that changed over time?

Because we all have these superimposed layers to the places we've lived and the places we've been that utterly transform the way we see places, like those transparencies that biology books have to show you first the skeletal system, and then the muscular system, and then the nervous system, and so on, until we are a fully fleshed human being with a protective, but frighteningly permeable outer skin.