I recently came across Avoiding Information Overload: Knowledge Management on the Internet by Adam Bostock. As you can see from the snippet below, Bostock is interested in enabling people to get more out of their online experience. For Bostock, a lot of this is driven by ideas of the semantic web.
It is estimated that there are over two billion Web pages, and thousands of newsgroups and forums, on the Internet - covering virtually every topic imaginable. However, many users find that searching the Internet can be a time consuming and tedious process. Even experienced searchers sometimes run into difficulties. To fully benefit from the potential opportunities of the Internet, both Web site developers and users need to be aware of the tools and techniques for managing and retrieving online knowledge.
This has driven the development of improved search and information retrieval systems. However, we now need sophisticated information extraction (and/or summary) capabilities to present the user only with the information they need, rather than a large set of relevant documents to read.
There are useful sections on various KM technologies as well as a view to where the technologies will be going in the future.