Since the internet was born, there has been a tug-of-war between aggregating information and finding ways to navigate through it. Two of the great navigation milestones were the Web browser and the search engine. Now, with the galloping growth of blogs (some 80,000 new blogs are created every day, according to blog search engine
Technorati
) and the proliferation of social-network sites, a growing group of companies is trying to figure out how to turn the cacophony of personalized information into usable form and viable businesses. They call it the Shared, Trust or Referral Economy, and it is the...
