A News Aggregator Idea: Filtering by Result Count

How about an aggregator technology that lets you filter the number of links you want by number? So instead of filtering by how recent of stories you want to see (to limit the number), you instead filter by how popular they were…to get you to a number you want to read.

So let’s say you decide you only want to spend 10 minutes a day catching up on news. So you decide you only want to read 20 stories. Period. So if it’s been two weeks since you read anything, you’ll get that two weeks distilled down to the best 20 stories of that two weeks.

Of course, determining what’s “best” is the whole key, but there are a number of ways of doing that with existing technologies:

• number of votes on a social site
• number of “likes” within Google Reader

…etc.

This would make the management of attention much easier; you could just say I’m going to read the 25 top stories in these two areas for whatever period of time you’ve been away and then be content that you’re caught up enough.

Thoughts? ::