Okay.. The reality of this blog is as it grows posts like this will fade away and disappear. I and any readers I may have will have to use the search box to find posts like this, and most of them will fail. Those who are reading this in the future well done, you've found it. Did you find it easy to get here? Was it because someone else suggested it, were you looking for it specifically or was it a completely random encounter?

The truth is I personally never know what I want, but I have a rough idea. It's like looking for a new house. Say I wanted to move to Belfast... I could find any house in Belfast no problem however could I find my dream house easily? No not really. Even with the power of Google and other search engines I'll end up plying through website after website looking for the answer with no luck.

Taggings quite a good way to do this. We can group similar blogs, but what if that tag is very general? With the house example a house in Belfast could be tagged "house" as could a house in New York. The tag gets me closer to that dream house but I still have to wade through the "junk" to find the house of my dreams. Sure I could create a tag for "Belfast houses" and one for "New York houses" but eventually these groups get bigger and I'd have to retag to keep that information meaningful and soon I have a vast number of tags, and then I'd have to search within those tags for "Belfast houses" and wade through all the tags associated with Belfast houses.

This is where mind maps and good tagging through collaboration can help I believe. Tag clouds (such as that on del.icio.us - http://del.icio.us/tag/) are a great way of pointing out the more important or more large of tags. I can get a feel for the size of the data in there. As long as I the reader am in tune with other readers of a website the most popular tags pop out at me. I can differentiate between them, I can make sure I look at the most popular items. The problem however is I am making that huge assumption that I am in tune with other readers. Take football for instance. Manchester United is probably the most popular team in the world and therefore if I was looking at tags of data (in whatever form it might be) associated with football teams, Manchester United is going to stick out in that tag cloud. I being a Nottingham Forest fan am not likely to see a prominent tag for them, but that's the information I (I being the key word) am looking for.

So now consider Stumbleupon. I can use stumbleupon to build up a profile of the things I personally am interested in. It doesn't know me very well at first and suggests quite dull information, but with time like a good friend it builds up knowledge of me as a person and gets better at suggesting stuff. I'd like to see a tag cloud that took my personal preferences into account when displaying data to me. Maybe one exists.. but I haven't heard of it.

But still we fall back on the issue that tag management isn't brilliant. You may find this post very boring or very interesting. Either way it depends on luck and the subjective opinion of people who read this that will determine whether this will be lost in the blog and thus in the world wide web forever. However if I maintain a structure to my tagging, a structure that could dynamically change through collaboration over time, a structure that has meaning (like a mind map), I might give it a better chance to be found. Really what I'm getting at is a new layer to search. You search for a term then instead of going through several pages you mine deeper through related key words that prompt you to get to the information you exactly need.

More on this later.