an interesting new field called "collaborative filtering" seems to have strong potential in helping separate signal-to-noise, and might be of interest to some cpunks here as a pet project. Brad Miller is working on his PhD. in this area and put together a nice system inside many news readers that allows people to read/ratings articles and track their ratings. the system uses the heuristic that people who agree or disagree consistently on ratings on particular messages in the past will tend to do so in the future, and it uses this to extrapolate ratings on messages a person has not yet rated. essentially he has all the technical stuff down and mostly just needs trial users. it wouldn't be hard to plug it all into the cpunk list to see how well it works. its the most promising route I know of at the moment, for solving an extremely difficult problem that pervades cyberspace. however, B.M. has been working on the project for a long time and at least from my perspective it doesn't seem to have reached "critical mass" yet, which surprises me. anyway, the URL http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GroupLens/grouplens.html is anyone here familiar with this project? what do you think about how effective it is?