I’ve started checking over the new Salon blogs, particularily Scott Rosenberg’s site, and I’m incredibly impressed at the level of discourse there. I have seen many kinds of blogs, but I’ve never really found a site I’ve liked as a starting point for blog discussions until now.

The most important problem is the age-old problem of “information overload.” I’ve generally been able to avoid this problem as I shy away from traditional media and television news and focus primarily on web and magazine journalism, the web for its tendancy to break new ground and new ideas months before the old media picks up on it, and the mags for their interesting in-depth reports on issues I wouldn’t otherwise see.

Salon is the best blend of these two things, and with Salon’s blogs as a starting point I’m finding myself increasingly without time to do all of the reading I’d like to. It used to be that information overload was about trying to process what you took in and paring it down to the important bits — now there is so much useful and important and well-thought out information and opinion that its very hard to manage. I feel like I’m missing out every day I don’t check in with all of my cyber friends.

When blogging was in the hundreds it was fringe, it the thousands it was a curiosity, in the hundreds of thousands it is becoming an overload, and in the millions I don’t know what we will do. There are only so many stories you can read, and only so many you will want to spend time on. And with so much churn there will inevitably be more and more and more rehashing of previously discussed ideas.

Scott Rosenberg snaps at the New York Times to picking up on a story his magazine covered months ago. I feel like we are increasingly backtracking and covering the same ground over and over and over. I’m sure Google Blog Search is coming, and that’ll probably help, but I dunno…there is so much great new informaton, and there is so much crap that is being recirculated and rebreathed and redigested. A Wiki web is perhaps what we need. A Wiki web combined with Everything and a rating system of Kuro5hin and a trust-metric. What a web that would be…