During my morning workout today I was listening to David Weinberger (Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces, Loosley Joined) giving a talk to the Library of Congress (LOC) about taxonomies, categorization and knowledge. He compared and contrasted these with the physical (i.e., libraries and the Dewey Decimal System) with the virtual (internet and/or digitized content), and how all that relates to the ‘old’ way of capturing knowledge vs. the ‘new’ way of handling it on the internet. Pretty interesting observations by Weinberger in this talk.

The reason he was invited by the LOC was his observational skills coupled with his blogging abilities and insights. The essence of where he ended, though, was troubling to me. It was all about the unstructured nature of blogs, the explosion of content, the cross-hyperlinking, and the difficulties of capturing all that information — without tying up the loose ends and actually have answers or recommendations.

There are ways being developed to pull together the blogosphere at least. Google bought Blogger. Technorati is doing a great job at identifying searchable blogs and having an engine to do so. Others like IceRocket, Daypop, BlogDigger, Bloogz, and even the boringly named "Blog Search Engine" are enabling the targeted searching of blogs.

While this is useful and there truly is a trend to be able to tap in to the collective consciousness of bloggers, how does this help drive knowledge? How can we turn this in to helpful information within a context of what we might be trying to find, learn or discover? What if we have specific knowledge we’re trying to gain…how do we find the published (encyclopedia’s, Wikipedia, mainstream media) *and* all the connections to them from bloggers? (This pre-supposes that bloggers are, in fact, hyperlinking to any of these published media — and many don’t). At the very least, is anyone tracking all of these connections being made by bloggers? (Maybe there is a trend here too).

Big problems to fix. Big minds thinking about them. We’ve only just begun….