1. My following list is well beyond “influential” people. You see three people because they are “power sharers” and at the time of the screenshot they were the ones who had shared stuff today. My list includes friends who are blog readers and whose opinion I value a lot. The list also includes colleagues both in the web development and web strategy industries. Using this technique I am able to read what's important to them – which is likely important to me.

2. Most blogging platforms offer RSS feeds based on categories or tags – you can try subscribing to those. Or run the feeds through FriendFeed or Yahoo! Pipes to glean out information based on keywords, likes, and comments.

I've also been using Feedly as a way to consume content as it has the ability to order based on the number of people who have “liked” or “shared” something.

I used to value diversity in my GR stream as well until I found out how much time I was wasting consuming information that really doesn't matter. I find my diversity in FriendFeed now (much like you do) – where the human filter can be scaled and the best content inevitably rises to the top. I get by the time ordering problem you describe in your post by creating filters and lists based on several factors – both around people and topics. It takes some time but the system works well.

Thanks for stopping by, leaving an excellent comment, and subscribing!

Your tool looks

2. All my experts post in multiple categories, and I don't care about all the categories. What should I do?

My response to both is to value diversity in my feed reader, and to find alternatives to raw time order (http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-06-06-18-18-34-soc). I see that screenshot with just three people represented and go blech :) Here's what I use: http://akkartik.name/newsflash.

(I've started adding more signals to rank posts, but that isn't released yet.)

Thank you for stopping by as well as helping me evaluate what's important in the tech world!

But now you can do that in Google Reader – so you can choose one or the other to consume the same information.

I've not yet decided which provides more value since I spend a lot of time in both. The conversations are where I find a lot of value in FriendFeed.