Dictionary.com defines inaugural as marking the launch of a new venture.

In the world of politics, inauguration is typically accompanied by a ceremony featuring a tightly scripted speech. Set the tone for the next four years! In a web venture, that custom involves a blog post meant to achieve the same objective — sharing a formative purpose and mandate — but with alot less hoopla.

So what exactly are we up to here at yet another new web venture in Silicon Valley?

Bazooked is pioneering Guided Navigation for consumers on the web. We think this is the first time any company has put this concept at the core of its vision. Now, to fill you in, Guided Navigation is all about helping users follow their interest in content on the web to logical conclusions. To insiders, I articulate our product vision as “related links meets TV Guide.” Bazooked is focused on the fact that web users don’t have a lot of hand holding to help them move across the web at “points of inspiration.” Content at the point of inspiration is certainly an emergent concept amongst search technologists, but there are many dimensions to it that transcend search. Yes, we all agree that the query will play a less prominent role in the future, but that’s only the beginning of it. In other words, this is an early category if you really think through the scope of what’s involved and all the pieces that will coalesce around it.

We think users will be jazzed about new ways that help solve or improve the classic tradeoff between user intervention and user empowerment that continues to stymie human-computer interaction on the web.

No, we’re not saying Bazooked will help you sort information as nimbly as Tom Cruise in Minority Report. But we are saying there are ways to organize information to remove steps in the cycle. Remove time getting users to relevant content, increase time users spend interacting with content. That’s our mission. Bring them into Bazooked, send them out. They’ll probably come back for more.

Keep in mind that users are creating value just by interacting with (not necessarily authoring) content in the era of ratings, tagging and sharing. Imagine the aggregate potential of shifting a sizable portion of web usage from retrieval to consumption. It unleashes a gush of collective creativity on massive scale. How do you enable this shift? By focusing on the middle step between retrieval and consumption — exploration. Make exploration work and consumption will mushroom.

Now, we don’t believe users will come to know Bazooked’s product as “Guided Navigation” in as much as people associate search with the broader categorization of “Information Retrieval.” They’ll refer to Bazooked’s content discovery network as something more casually defined. We’re not putting a label on it and will let users do that for us.

Back to the inaugural reference for a moment. Unlike political life, web ventures are very transparent. Obfuscation is counter-productive and framing issues is pointless. Users do the talking so success lies in listening. Believe or not, this is a challenging discipline for any organization to inculcate. People in jobs like to do a whole lot more opinion-sharing than listening. One of the key values we’re using here at Bazooked is the idea of living in the moment. We like to keep our ears low to the ground to hear the sounds that knock gently but often. This is a core driver for us both in a business and personal context (is there really a difference?).

Anyhow, being user-centric is the whole point of Bazooked as a web application. Living out your inspirations around web content and information is what Bazooked is all about. But a product doesn’t just drop out the sky, so as a group of people, a start-up in this age must demonstrate the fluidity and flexibility to live in the moment. I guess you can say that the fate of our products and people are tied together in deep ways. To seize the moment, you have to be in it, eh?

So here we go with a little experiment called Bazooked that I think is meaningful for the web. We don’t have all the answers, but we bet our bottom dollars that our core proposition makes sense.