IF YOU'VE ever searched the internet for a web log or "blog", you'll know how difficult it is to find what you're after. But the imminent release of a new generation of software could do for blogging what Google did for the web as a whole.

A blog is a journal posted on a website with entries about any subject under the sun. In the past couple of years, blogging has become hugely popular with the release of software that allows even the most computer illiterate cyber-scribes to publish their muses at the push of a button. Now with more than 2.5 million active blogs, the "blogosphere" is fast becoming an impenetrable mess.

The only way to search for a blog is to enter a single keyword or phrase, such as "physics" or "origin of life", into a specialist search engine. This would give you every blog that contains this ...