As any good librarian knows, classification is a hell of a tough job. Clay Shirky puts it well - you have to be part mind reader, part fortune teller. No matter how clever a taxonomy of subjects you come up with, second guessing search behaviour let alone the future development of new topic areas makes the job near impossible. Dewey had it easy.

Here is an irony for you. There is a growing number of people who consume their news and information exclusively through aggregated headline readers, made possible by the magic of RSS feeds. If you are reading this in your mail client, you are clearly not one of them. Your reluctance is entirely reasonable. After all, push content is nothing new and for the most part, nothing spectacular. In the late nineties, Microsoft experimented with web channel subscriptions in Internet Explorer. And then there was push pioneer Pointcast, who we all remember for the $450 million deal that they didn't do. However this time round, the buzz around syndication has a different flavour and not one that may be as pleasant tasting to the media status quo.

It seems that people have discovered a new hobby - talking about themselves online. And if uploading millions of pages every day about their ordinary lives and loves wasn’t enough – this rising legion of gonzo laureates are demanding their place in the sun. By all acounts, they are getting it. According to studies by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly a third of US internet users read blogs. Eight million of these have created one of their own. The next phase, however, is even more interesting – distributed publicity.

As the old Zen saying goes, if a leaf falls in a forest does anyone notice? Certainly, a random post in the blogosphere could easily vanish without a trace unless you are jacked in via one of the growing number of online publicity groupings. What I have labelled 'distributed publicity' refers to the ability of a network to divide and direct its audience to relevant segments of user generated content, whether this be in the form of web postings, photos, gift wishlists or even classified advertisements. The viral quality of these networks, which rely on their own momentum to acquire more users is also very financially attractive compared to sites which require heavy marketing budgets. No wonder then that Google and Yahoo have placed such companies on the top of their shopping lists.

A good example of distributed publicity in action is the photo sharing site Flickr. Flickr is not only a clever software application to store and manage your photos - its use of social networking brings an immediate and relevant audience to your photo album who will offer feedback and become your own mini fan base. Similarly, while anyone these days can easily set up their own weblog, hitching your efforts to a network like Myspace will allow you to co-author content with a growing number of like-minded bloggers who will leave their own graffiti style commentary on your pages. The addictive quality of such services is not merely having access to a tool to write about your life, but rather interaction with an audience who will share it with you.

Of course, it is not just voyeuristic consumers who are playing the fame game. More sophisticated webloggers aiming for web celebrity status now offer syndication via customised RSS feeds, trackbacks which reveal what other sites are commentating on your posts, and weblog advertising networks such as Blogads. Forget office watercooler notoriety. Today’s Digerati are focused on their Technorati rating, which profiles the number of sources that link to their weblog. Fortunately, the payoffs are more than the trickle feed of click revenue from Google’s Adsense program. Well known professional bloggers are using their new found status to launch books, consulting and speaking services.

The network benefits of weblog publicity are very similar to the kinds of features economists identify when analysing the operation of markets and trading exchanges. Sites like eBay or Monster have worked incredibly well, largely at the expense of traditional newspaper classifieds, for the reason that they deliver a huge volume of active buyers and sellers. The rationale for participation is compelling. You can post the fact that you have a toaster for sale on your own website, but you are likely to get a much better response if that post is on an auction site with millions of potentially interested buyers. Not everyone thinks this will be the case for long.

Bob Wyman, who co-founded Pubsub, recently wrote an influential post recently which argued that a combination of search engines with ‘Structured Blogging’ will force many of today's web businesses to adapt or shut down. By structured data, Wyman was referring to means of including tags in web pages and blog postings which identify information for what it is, rather than just a bunch of searchable text. So a restaurant review, can be identified by a search engine as a “review” and aggregated appropriately. Similarly, a resume in your “about me” page could also be tagged, and then indexed by a headhunter as part of a recruitment search result.

People have been talking about the semantic web for almost as long as the non semantic one has been around. Arguably if better meta data existed, you wouldn’t need Google’s clever workaround of link popularity to find relevant content or a site like eBay to help sellers find buyers. But while on level such order seems irresistible, the highly distributed nature of the web makes enforcing compliance to formal content rules difficult and even undesirable. Further, while the structured data approach makes life easier for people who know what they are looking for, it doesn’t address the importance of passive communities of interest that collect around favoured content.

Most of the people who hang out on Flickr peering in on other people’s lives via their photo albums probably didn’t start the day with the search term “middle aged man in faded tracksuit doing washing”. But, if the subject happens to be one of your photo contacts chances are you will look at that photo even though you would have never have thought of doing so otherwise. In many ways the real magic behind the growing number of distributed publicity networks is the entertainment value of their randomness.

In the early days of the web, sites banded together in web rings and participated in banner exchange networks to cost effectively acquire traffic. The distributed publicity networks of today are very similar in philosophy but vastly more sophisticated in scope and execution. Search engines may eventually become smart enough to find exactly what you are looking for. In the meantime, most of us will continue enjoying accidentally stumbling on what we were not.

Blogging, podcasting, mobile picturing taking, file swapping – lately you might be forgiven for wondering whether there is any limit to the technology bandwagons consumers will happily jump on. Yet there is method to their madness. In the main, technology has stopped being the calling card of myopic ubergeeks, and become as embedded in average people’s lives as the TV or telephone. Forget applications. It’s all about appliances.

When it comes to advertising space, you can really have too much of a good thing. However traditional ways of dealing with remnant inventory - discounting and supply restriction - have caused chronic problems for online publishers. So, just how do you give advertisers more of what they want, and less of what they don't?

Both broadcast and publishing industries have developed their own ways of managing advertising supply and demand. Magazine publishers generally plan their book sizes, not on editorial but on the number of pages they expect to sell. TV broadcasters similarly, have a ratio of ad avails per timeslot which is fixed by format and occaisonally by legislation. Not only is scarcity a good way to control pricing, but it is also a means of protecting the value of sold spots to existing advertisers. The Clear Channel radio network, for example, last year took active steps to reduce clutter by imposing on a company wide ceiling on the number of advertising minutes per hour.

Unfortunately not all companies have the same view when it came to the web. Like Central American dictators who routinely fired up the Treasury printers whenever they needed more cash, greedy websites have also flooded the market with bottom of the page banners, excessive text links, ad boxes of every size and dimension, rotating logos and god knows what else. For a while, the resulting glut led to bottom of the pond CPM rates, and the unpleasant necessity of cutting backroom pure acquisition deals with media chop shop operators. And yet paradoxically, a small percentage of those ads - known as premium inventory and typically in key content areas such as technology or finance - would sell out completely, leaving publishers in a dilemma.

Smart web publishers are now being far more careful about the way they deal with remnant inventory. Running house ads is fine for a limited amount of impressions, but too much and you risk the effectiveness of other commercial campaigns. Many operators now use Google or Overture to resell space on their behalf, with keyword campaigns linked to relevant content on the page. Yields are not amazing, but they are a hell of a lot better than the kinds of deals that were taking place before search targeted marketing took off.

The real solution to the inventory paradox may come not through limiting supply, but rather through gaining greater insights into audience behaviour. Web analytics software increasingly allows publishers to track the behaviour of site visitors and tag advertising accordingly. So even all the finance related inventory of a site sells out, finance related ads can still be served to a viewer as they progress to other parts of the network. What is not yet clear, however, is whether advertising is significantly less effective when it is directly related to the content on page or just tagged to a reader's generic interests.

There is no doubt that web publishers have a bit to learn from the inventory management strategies of traditional media companies. However, the fluidity of web advertising can become a strength if publishers can find ways to focus their advertising efforts without resorting to the commercial cacophony that is a feature of so many sites.