Well, “serious” newspapers aren’t necessarily the solution since they usually have other filters: they show you what some other people think is important rather than what algorithms expect you to want to see. But I’m not sure whether there really is a solution. There’s a very positive aspect to having algorithms pre-sort the information you read: there’s just too much information flowing around to sort it yourself. After carefully curating my reading list of blogs on Google Reader for years, I’m starting to abandon it because it’s become too much to actually follow. On Twitter at least I only see the stuff that’s flying around *right now* rather than collecting mountains of backlog reading. And Twitter doesn’t automatically pre-filter at all, but lets you select what sources to follow, just like Google Reader.
Hmm.
I think finding a balance between filtering out too much and seeing too much is going to become a major challenge of this decade (amongst some other major challenges, like a monetary system stretching to its logical limit, and peak oil.)