Monday morning search blues

Monday morning, after the week long U.S. July 4th celebration, the tech world comes back to life, stepping up to the giant keyboard for another round of clickety-clack digital inputs and outputs. What important news is hitting the wires? Can your read any subtle or major changes in the pulses of the blogosphere? Millions or billions of simultaneous threads are pouring across the Internet pipes, superstrings of conversation vibrating in cyberspace dimensions. How do you pick out the most ripe signals (for you), the conversations that intersect with what's indexed at the top of your head, and the related threads that could lead to some sliver of enlightenment?

This morning it's mostly manual labor, with a few programmed feeds and keyword searches. Primitive search, stone age tools in the so-called modern age, but then everything is relative. No enlightment, just the river of words and images, no shortcuts. We turn to the attention pool, social search, semantic search, the prodigious research budgets at Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, all trying to crack the cosmic search egg. First they have to find the egg...which makes the task rather difficult with their own search technologies. Maybe next year...