All of the items in the Top Stories section link off to their respective source sites. This might come as a shock to Mr Murdoch, but the Times isn’t my homepage; nor is the Sun. If it wasn’t for their headlines appearing on Google News on iGoogle, which is my homepage, I wouldn’t ever need to visit those sites. What else do you notice? No ads. Google aren’t monetising this page, which is another reason to question how this hurts News Corp.

Rather than look at them as some kind of competition, News Corp need to see Google and Yahoo as a (and I apologise for the 1990′s AOL reference) portal into their own content. Let Google send me to your site, and when I’m there, give me content compelling enough to make me stick around. To make matters worse, News Corp’s chief, Rupert Murdoch, has gone on record to say that “we intend to charge for all our news websites“. In the face of falling readership and advertising revenue for their physical media business, the last thing News Corp wants to be doing is putting a pay wall around their web-based content. There will always be other, free places to get the news; if not News Corp’s direct competitors, then smaller, feisty startups like BNO. Today, some of those news sources lack authority, compared to the News Corp sites; as pay walls go up, that will change.

If you were in charge of this multibillion dollar, international news and media organisation, what would you do? Does putting a pay wall around the web-based news content seem like a smart play, or are there better ways to monetise?

Now, with PubSubHubbub, if there is any slowdown, it’s clear it’s with me, because Google has the gas pedal pushed all the way to the floor.

This got me thinking. My Reader stats (right) are far lower than Louis’, and yet there are times when I feel swamped by the amount of information I’m trying to filter. The volume of information scrolling down my screen right now on Friendfeed is such that the first page often refreshes before I’ve finished reading one article.

Although PSH solves the problem created by the latency of RSS-client polling periods, the next challenge is making sure that we don’t miss the stuff that really interests us. As consumers of shared items, blog updates et al, we will need to get smarter about making sure that the “interesting”stuff bubbles to the top of our attention stream.

How do we do that? How can we define “interestingness”? Can we build attention flags into our software tools in such a way that we don’t lose sight of why we’re wading through our real-time river?

At the moment, I rely on a combination of Google Reader – although I find Feedly to be a more configurable, usable top layer for Reader – Friendfeed and Lazyfeed. Even then, I’ll come across articles on one or other of those services a day or so after the fact and wonder, “how did I miss that?”.

Maybe I’m not using the filtering capabilities offered by my chosen services to their fullest; maybe there are other services that are worth taking a look at. If you’ve got any insights about you filter your feeds for the interesting stuff, do share them in the comments, below.