If you’ve got one RSS feed from a mass site, you get an overview of everything. If you have 20 RSS feeds for 20 niche sites you have information overload.

Thanks for giving this so much thought - for engaging with it!

What you might also consider is reputation and rating systems.

If digg (for example) ranks dead topless girlfriends alongside Blair’s exit from office that’s because on a mass scale they are equally interesting (to the community known as digg).

But in the niche of shared interest in which stories about dead girlfriends are important (I’m going a bit extreme here for illustrative purposes)the topless girlfriend story actually ranks way higher than the Blair story.

And in the followers of British politics niche, it doesn’t even register, while Blair towers supreme.

Provided the recommendation made to you is from a niche community you trust (and digg isn’t building this, it simply has a recommendation for what is most popular in mass terms, as far as I understand it)then it has much greater value to you.

Trust does not derive from mass. Not for digital natives, at least.

A million people can be ‘wrong’ - at least as far as you or I or our niche shared interest group may be concerned.

A couple of recent posts you might also consider:
http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2007/06/why-targeting-ad-message-cant-be-enough.html

and: http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-to-please-all-of-people-all-of-time.html

and maybe: http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2007/06/news-real-time-personalised-information.html

… if you have time.