Blogs and Categorization

I find it very interesting that the blog world is looking at categorization as a way to start putting some order around this growing corpus of data.
Technorati: Tags

Companies like Factiva discovered more than a decade ago that comprehensive, univeral metadata on content is vital for organizing and managing large bodies of content.

It seems that the blogosphere is no different than any other corpus of unstructured data in this way. It will be fasinating to see it grow as the Web did.

Remember when Web directories were all the rage in the mid to late 90s because this growing thing (the Internet) needed some order put around it? -- I was involved in Dow Jones's take on that (Dow Jones Buiness Directory). We did it because we knew our clients were looking at the Internet and needed advice as to how best use it efficiently.

Now, directories have becoming largely obsolete largely because Google has made searching for information much more efficient than Yahoo and Excite and the others were in the mid 90s.

It seems obvious to me that companies will be stepping up now to put more order around the Blogosphere. Categorization is one of those things.