There are some exceptions, especially within specific areas of business. Yelp utterly *owns* restaurant name SEO, in part because restaurant Web sites are awful and in part because Yelp usually delivers quality information about a place (hours, address, cuisine, etc.) right up front.
Depsite some issues (squatters, domainers, black hat SEO phreaks), URLs are a good system for figuring out who’s who on the Internet. You can pretty much rely on the idea that a company name that you see in real life is also where you will find them on the Web. Coke is coke.com. Microsoft is Microsoft.com.
This has evolved via a number of methods– starting with centralized DNS administration, but also via litigation and case law, the free market, the startling efficiency of the Google search engine, and just standard business practice. I can pretty much find authoritative pages on the Web for most any business.
But I want more than the relative efficacy of the URL system for finding companies. This is basically the @mention feature in Twitter, but it be can’t be Twitter– they are a private company, and we’ve seen lately how dangerous it is to rely on a single source for anything. Also, not every person, place, and thing is on Twitter (despite the hype!).
Once we have this– where everything has a unique URI to which we can refer, we could easily aggregate everything said about everything. Not via Google results, or Yelp reviews, or any other private service, but in an open list that is available to all.
Facebook seems to be rolling toward creating a unique URI for every human on the planet. Since they are a company, I don’t known if that’s such a great idea, but there are plenty of people writing about that.
http://api.simplegeo.com/1.0/context/41.90,87.65.json
http://api.simplegeo.com/1.0/context/41.908381,-87.659388.json