With so much material being generated on the web, how do we find those ideas that represent real quality? And how do we go about promoting content of our own that is worthy of the attention of others? I have experimented over the last year and a half with web-logging or "blogging". My motivation has been twofold.

Firstly, I have wanted to use a weblog as a tool for personal knowledge management. It has worked up to a point. I have noticed that I have not blogged as often as I have had ideas that needed to be jotted down. Instead I have waited until I had time to craft something I was happy to publish to the web. This has meant that I have not noted down some potentially useful ideas, meaning they don't get developed, and so some of the benefits of a weblog as a personal knowledge tool have been missed.

My second motivation has been to contribute to and benefit from the community of bloggers by interacting with the ideas of others. Again, this has worked for me up to a point. The problem I find is that, even limiting myself to weblogs, it is impossible to keep up with even a small proportion of content being produced on a given theme. With some of the weblogs that I follow, I wonder whether too much is being said. Unfortunately, the more that is said, the less I am able to pay attention.

With both my own writing and the writing of others, my use of the technology has been less than it could have been because of the absence of what I would describe as a taxonomy of quality. Some of the pieces I write are of the nature of rough and ready ideas, trial balloons. Other pieces are well thought out and deserve a greater prominence. A reverse-chronological weblog presents the most recent as the most prominent, which does not reflect value other than currency. At present, the taxonomy of quality is not reflected in the otherwise extremely useful RSS feeds that stream into my browser.

On my own site I am trying to handle this by reducing the number of items that are promoted to the front page, whilst increasing the number of posts that represent ideas in development. The latter may or may not develop into something worthy of the front page. In this I am using a feature of a very flexible Content Management System (Drupal for those that are interested). All the material I write is available and searchable through controlled vocabularies and indexing, but not everything is given prominence. This way I can at least give my own indication of quality.

What I would like with incoming RSS feeds is to have the ability to set a quality threshold. From some writers, perhaps those with whom I am working, I would like to read every odd thought and contribution they make. However, I don't have the time to read (or even scan) every item posted on all the sites I would like to track. But I would like to be alerted to key ideas - a kind of "I've really thought this through and its worth listening to me" tag. In conversation we have the means to set a value on our contributions, through countless physiological and emotional signals. In the so called "blogosphere", good ideas do percolate across the web, but being virtual interactions we have to be far more intentional in the way we communicate a sense of value.

If our goal is the creation and management of knowledge, quality is integral to what we are doing, and with quality it is often true that less is more.