On Information Aggregation

As I see friends post links to very interesting articles, pictures, photos, and websites from a variety of sources, my mind quietly explodes with the sheer number of interesting combinations these pieces could produce. I wonder if we took the creators of this media and put them all in a good dinner party, what would come of it?

It leads me to think that the act of taking source info and getting real meaning from it, the critical voice, is probably the most important and most value added exercise found on the internet. It is also the least structured. Its the lack of structure that frustrates me, as even art is meaningless without some rules or context surrounding it.

So what does this mean? It probably means that I write a terrible research essay, which I will neither confirm nor deny, but there must be some guidelines at the blog-level, a framework for taking multiple sources and mixing them together.... I'm sure Google does a form of this in their search rankings, but there should be more, a search framework for blogs, essays, etc that could really make information come together better, and allow the people to benefit from it.

Is this the semantic web? (3.0)? It might be, but the first big question that comes to mind is how general info and its meaning could be categorized. Is there a 'Tag' dictionary out there? Can natural language be parsed into a set of universal questions... even that simplification is unworkable...

So, I'll leave it at that, if anyone stumbles upon this post, and knows of some good info aggregators, let me know.