I have been trying to figure out how to increase the signal to noise ratio for information on the net since back when I was reading usenet and the internet was still a distant fantasy. I got stuck on the idea that the web site should somehow decide what was good and what was bad, based on getting feedback from readers, allowing the stuff that people liked to "rise to the top." This was an interesting idea but I could never figure out how to get the information back from the readers without becoming annoying.

I'm starting to see that the web log may be the solution to the problem, formed emergently and organically by the millions of genetic algorithms (using wetware and real genes) poking away at it on the internet. Once again, the solution came by turning the problem completely sideways, but it's elegantly simple: instead of establishing "goodness" by some machine on an article-by-article basis, let the readers decide which writers they want to read. "The best indicator of past performance is future performance," so a writer that interests you now will have a much better chance of interesting you in the future. The RSS reader allows you to create your own solution based on your favorite writers, so you have complete freedom to create your own "newspaper." (I remember when they started talking about "custom newspapers" but it was still framed in the context of traditional news media). The elegance of the solution is astonishing.