Information and the expansion of choices among consumer products are proliferating. There remains one big problem. To grasp this problem, a problem which is leading to the explosion of all the Web 2.0 stuff, let's return to our illustration.

If you walk into a Tower Records you will have a buying experience that has been carefully planned out. Inventory has been carefully researched. The point of purchase displays have been planned and designed. New releases are grouped on one wall, and aisle end caps feature the most popular artists in their genre. Sections are labeled by category and organized alphabetically. But what about our imaginary record store? How would it be laid out? How big would it be? How would you find what you were looking for? What if each genre has several rooms of music not just a couple rows? What if there were aisles and aisles of sub-genres and categories you'd never heard of?

If such a store existed you would probably walk out before long, simply overwhelmed with choices and unable to find what you were looking for. There would be just too much information to handle. Well this is the current dilemma of the online marketplace. Google does a good job helping you find stuff you're looking for. But what about the things you aren't actually looking for, but you would prefer if you knew about? How do we take a world of choices and narrow them down to a manageable few? And how do we do this without retail product managers condensing our options, or editors deciding which articles we can read, or Siskel & Ebert helping us sort through all the videos?

Given the vastness of what is available there really can't be human filters. Yahoo started off being a human reviewed directory of websites, but before too long the exponential growth in the number of websites made that approach impossible - and Google came along with a better - automated algorithm and took the lead in search.

And while Google still has a dominant position there are other ways to identify, discover, rank and filter all the stuff out there. That's what all these new Web 2.0 social collaboration, tagging, and sharing systems are all about. And that's where we will pick up next month.