David Sifry kept searching. He tried Yahoo and Google. But he wasn't finding what he really wanted: himself.

"I just wanted to know when anyone in the world was talking about me," he says.

The year was 2002 and Sifry had just discovered blogging. He was hooked—not so much on the chance to vent his own opinions but to see what other people were saying about him.

But the blogosphere is a dynamic place that changes by the minute and conventional search engines were giving Sifry results that were, at best, weeks old. So he built his own search engine, Technorati, to scan almost every blog on the Internet and deliver up-to-the-moment results.

Today Technorati indexes over 68 million blogs and is the recognized authority on what's being said on the web—right now.

When did you first understand the power of information?
When I was kid and I realized I could "parent-split"—tell Mom that Dad said one thing and Dad that Mom said something else. It's classic information arbitrage, at least until Mom and Dad talk to each other, at which point you don't get that new Transformer toy you really want.

What's the most important piece of information you've ever learned?
Do you have a boyfriend? Are you married? Those are pretty important pieces of information. There was also that time when the home-pregnancy test turned blue. That may have been the most important piece of information.

Why are blogs so popular?
They satisfy people's need for communication and entertainment and they allow you to participate in amazing social experiences. We're moving away from a consumer-producer dichotomy and moving into an information economy, where we're all producing for each other and consuming from each other. So bring your cameraphone. You never know when Michael Richards might go nuts in a comedy club.

Do you have any information heroes?
Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive. He's helping archive all this ephemeral information so that we have a place to go if we want to see what the web looked like in 1996 or 1998. That would be lost if not for guys like Brewster.

What tools do you use to manage information?
I'm a packrat and never throw anything away. I have a couple of terabytes of storage in my house. But I also use DVDs as my backup system. Every holiday season I take all the videos and photos I shot over the year and burn them to four or five DVDs, which I then send out to family as my holiday card. So if San Francisco has another earthquake or there's a fire at my house, I have multiple redundant storage systems in place.

What's been the biggest change in information management in the last 10 years?
The steady decrease in the price of storage has had a significant impact. And, because my hobby is photography, the significant increase in quality and decrease in cost of digital imaging.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed?
During the 2004 political campaign. I remember wishing I had a wall of TV screens in my living room. But there was so much information coming in there was no way I could remain sane or productive. Still, even though I don't have enough time the rest of the world does. I rely on the wonderful network ability of millions of people to make decisions about the things I should be looking at.

What information would you really like to know right now?
What stock will hit tomorrow. Of course we can't see tomorrow today. But actually the future is already here—it's just unevenly distributed. The question is not what tomorrow's stock price will be but how to make sure you're at the front of the information curve, so you can make smart decisions and correct failures more quickly than everyone else. If you can do those two things, you can't lose.