Mugged by the blogosphere

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Mugged by the blogosphere - or how to find nuggets in a cyberswamp: "After wading through 353 comments, I'm looking for some shortcuts that will lead me to the wisdom of crowds

Yet to find these buried nuggets you have to take an exhausting five-mile trek through a seemingly endless swamp of views - some intelligent, others stupid, some well-informed, others ignorant, some polite, others abusive. How could the trek be made easier and more rewarding? One helpful device would be to enable users to rate contributions, from one to five stars, as happens in some other discussion forums. So as a subsequent reader you could go swiftly hopping through the swamp, from marked mound to mound. In the archived version, those contributions that got fewer than, say, two stars, might appear only as a link. You could still follow the development of the debate, but without having to stumble over so much garbage along the way."