Taking a break from industrious information systems, we decided to use our tools for good, trying our hand at building a blog platform, to see just how tricky it actually was.

The verdict: tricky being an understatement. The simple type-post-view architecture is simple, that much was a given. The unknown quantities were tagging, viewing, archiving and the ever-present feed issue.

Still, some deft database querying, a bundle of expletives and a few hundred lines of code later, we have our baby, a blogging system with search-engine-friendly URLs, full RSS support and automatic archiving.

The web grows at a speed and with it volumes of blogs, articles and user generated content compound forming an intricate and chaotic web of pages, images and more recently video. Google changed everything by not only offering the tool to search through all this content but crucially a way to rank its importance through PageRank™.

So, ten years on is PageRank serving us well? For example a search for "Yoga London" in Google brings up no less than 440, 000 results the first 3 results being Camden Council, View London and Yoga Holidays. The first thing this alludes to is that Google knows of places that "know" rather than the answer to my question rather than point directly to studios and gyms which offer yoga in London.

What does this mean for Google and PageRank? The answer is simple and has been bandied around for a while now - semantics...

At Byng Systems we're all about collaboration and communication for enterprise web applications but our technology is just as adept at representing a brand or identity. Take the example of generating a tag cloud for our website...

• Tag cloud for Byng Systems