As at Alice's Restaurant, you can get anything you want - but unless you have software help, you might never find what you are looking for. Thus, schemes like Gopher and Veronica, WAIS and Mosaic, are the hottest things on the Net today. Were it not for the Internet's cultural bias against selling things for money, all these context-making schemes would cost plenty to use. But the highest ground in the context arena may not end up in the hands of the technocrats at all. The scarcest of context resources will be something utterly beyond the ken of cold algorithms - point of view.
Point of view is what successful media have trafficked in for centuries.
Books are merely the congealed point of view of their authors, and we buy newspapers for the editorial point of view that shapes their content. We watch particular TV anchors for their point of view, and we take or ignore movie advice from our friends based on their point of view. In a world of hyperabundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources , and we will race to model human points of view within the personalities of our software agents. I will even bet that an industry will grow up around individuals licensing their points of view for use in context engines in exchange for usage royalties. Imagine being able to give your news agent the personality and perspective of Walter Cronkite, Howard Stern, or John Updike, or consult the software-doubles of Siskel and Ebert for advice on cool movies to view.