Quality vs. quantity

This could almost have been one of those stupid "here I am again" posts that you catch on some aggregators like weblogs.asp.net. Seems like every man and his dog wants to let you know that they are still alive. Hardly a day goes by where I don't see a couple of them.

That got me thinking - with all this blogging going on (wonder what percentage of internet traffic is blog reading vs. spam these days?) what's the best way to reduce the noise?

Many ways to skin a cat
RSS aggregators like that one, or Scoble's link blog are a great way of trawling a lot of content for the needle in the haystack. I can clear 200-300 posts in about 20 minutes and only end up reading a handful. I do find it much easier following the aggregators of the aggregators like Bruce Schneier for security stuff. He seems to pick up the gems for me :-)

Then there's podcasting, which is OKif you have the bandwidth. I know it's coming - slower in my part of the world than others, but I'll also really only want the good stuff if I go audio. It won't be possible to scan hundreds of podcasts, so the aggregated form it still required, unless we can come up with a cunning plan to get the "news headlines" in audio form.

Reducing the noise
As always, the quality of some blogging is not so high. A lot of it is also irrelevant to my interests, particularly on aggregated feeds like Slashdot or Boing Boing.

Further, so many blogs are about the same thing, with hundreds of people linking to the same site. Although this is a great way of establishing interest and give Google some good feedbakc for their PageRank engine, what I think would be cool is a way to get this sort of page rank shown along side a link. It could work in (at least) two ways:

1. Use hyperlinks that display the Google PageRank alongside the link;
2. Create a way of aggregating many other feeds/blogentries/links and automagically merge the common elements (i.e. the 50 entries that link to the new trailer for the Hitchhickers Guide to the Galaxy) all become a single entry with some sort of counter beside it (ala PageRank again);