Although many complex CMS's have been developed over the years- each applying its own methodology for creating content- none has been powerful and easy enough at the same time. This gap has finally been filled by the concept of Weblogs.
The power of the Weblogs stems from the sheer simplicity it provides, opening the door to millions of people to create content and publish online. Finally, blogs have become an essential part of any web site, and in most cases are themselves standalone web sites. Soon, saying "web site" will almost always mean "Blog". And having a web site will be like having an email address.
The fact that we have made it easy for people to throw more and more content online, a gap has naturally formed between the traditional search engines with their smart bots probing the web and their ability to keep up with the new content being created every second. Not only in terms of quantity, but in terms of making sense of all that content.
In the old days, a smart bot if given an random 100 web pages to comprehend, and has a success rate of 50% will be deemed very successful because in those days, the 50% that is comprehensible by the bot is the actual important content, while the other 50% most likely includes more garbage and un-important material.
Why? In those days, only corporates, businesses, institutions, and web savvy individuals were able to create and publish content. Publishing content was part of an organized development process, which made sure the content was properly formatted and optimized for search engine indexing, and -in a lot of cases- was actively being submitted to more than one major search engine.
Managing knowledge is very different from managing content, simply because content management (the production and management of raw text and other media) is one element of knowledge management (the organization and presentation of content based on understanding and verifying it).
The answer to some parts of the puzzle has come in the form of tagging, which has changed the way we organize content in two ways: The first is by replacing the concept of categorization which has been a limiting factor in almost all content management systems, because no one topic is limited to one or two or even ten categories. The second is by being a purely human activity, which meant better accuracy in determining the full scope of topics and meanings addressed by any piece of content. So we can safely say that after being tagged, content can start to be called "knowledge".
Other parts of the puzzle are still waiting to be answered, like the issue of quality and validity; What determines if this or that content is useful and of good quality? Of course you Google the topic first, then skim through a few articles and decide. But this is an opportunity for the extremely competitive multi-billion dollar search engine industry that will not be left unaddressed.
I believe we will see more and more innovations that will greatly enhance the presentation of content and our ability to consume and make use of it. This will open the door for smaller and more specialized sites/engines which cover a specific topic, organizing and presenting relevant information in a way that is geared towards a specific audience. If you look closely, this is already happening.
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