The blogosphere refers to the distributed network of user
opinions published on the WWW. Whereas centralized re-
view sites such Amazon.com previously allowed users to post
opinions on goods such as books and CDs, blogging software
allows users to publish opinions on any topic without con-
straints on predefined schema. However, centralized review
sites such as Amazon.com have one significant advantage:
reviews pertaining to a single topic are collected together
in one place, allowing readers to peruse a diverse range of
opinions quickly. In this paper we examine how such a topic-
centric view of the Blogosphere can be created. We charac-
terise the problems in aligning similar concepts created by
a set of distributed, autonomous users and describe current
initiatives to solve the problem. Finally, we introduce the
Tagsocratic project, a novel initiative to solve the concept
alignment problem using techniques derived from research in
language acquisition among distributed, autonomous agents.