Blog rating
It seems like there should be some sort of a way to weight the blogosphere such that "interesting" new things filter to the top. But not all blogs are equally read, nor all readers equal.
In some ways this reminds me of building a personal web of trust with signing private keys in public key encryption, which never really went anywhere. But were this accomplished in blogging it would add to the credibility of news coming out of blogs. Really it all comes back to a topic Lessig covered nicely in Code: Having a way to identify ourselves in cyberspace and to trust the identity of others is really useful. Balancing that with privacy and the desire at times to be able to be anonymous, things generally (barely still?) possible in realspace, is the hard part.
I've been to the sites like del.icio.us but they seem to be best at getting a list of the most popular transient memes. I'd like to expand my reading on "interesting" things beyond the filters that Slashdot, BoingBoing and a few other sites represent to something more intelligent and personalised/customised.
Thinking back ten years we had Ringo trying to do this for music. In the meantime I find I'm still mostly relying on Nic Harcourt and KCRW to filter good new music to my ears.
In 1995 talk of autonomous agents was all the rage. But what do we have today? Manually created/maintained, essentially static lists of RSS feeds from the "interesting" sources? In the early 1990 David Brin's novel Earth described a possible global information network with agents bringing info to us. It seems like there's been very little progress towards that type of intelligent automation.
With smart enough agents calculating dynamically the trust value of given content maybe it could even all be done without requiring a crytographic means of establishing server/user identity. Certainly that should be easier to do for finding "interesting" content. But if I'm going to rely on an agent to create and control my view of the world, I'd sure like to be able to control the level of trust simultaneously.
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