If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it fall – does it make a noise? If you have a site with a huge archive and people cant find what is in it – does it have any value?

There are likely millions of blogs out there that over time have become deep repositories of knowledge about all subjects. Cooking, Defense, Mechanics, Learning, Technology, Organizational Development  – whatever. All this in aggregate makes Wikipedia look like thin paperback. In a decade these stores of knowledge will represent the most important reservoir of knowledge that mankind has ever assembled.

Just think of this site. More than 2 years of writing on all aspects of social media is locked up in the archive – just as everyone now wants to learn about how social media works. But all this knowledge is in reality locked up because it is too hard to find it.

But what about Google? Google just scratches the surface of this immense ocean of knowledge. You have to know what you are searching for and it does not easily let you follow a thread of similar thoughts or to find others in the field who can add more. If this blog or even my own personal blog had a search tool that could enable you to find the many “Books” in them it would change the value of the site.

The current value reality of many blogs is this:

• Their content is most valuable when it is current
• The writer is on treadmill
• The archive is largely hidden because you have to know what to search for and because it is hard to find associated content
• So older content loses value and the internal connections are rarely made
• So the blog never builds in value over time but the latent value does build

The same is true for conventional content providers such as iTunes or NPR or PBS. Their real value lies dormant in their archive.

I as a blogger want you to find this value on my site. PBS want you to find the value in its archive too. We have these huge investments that offer us a minimal return. You as a seeker want to find the gold out there. Everything is there if only you can find it easily.

So here is the opportunity – an approach to search that allows a contextual search, that aggregates supporting material, that truly allows exploration will take the value of the web up to a new level.

Because real value is involved, there will be an economic incentive to be able to do this. The scale of the opportunity will be many times the size of any alternative inside the firewall.

Hint to the Fast Guys!