I'm back fron Burning Man (and Worldcon), and though we had a decently successful internet connection there this time, you don't want to spend time at Burning Man reading the web. This presents an instance of one of the oldest problems in the "serial" part of the online world, how do you deal with the huge backup of stuff to read from tools that expect you to read regularly.

You get backlogs of your E-mail of course, and your mailing lists. You get them for mainstream news, and for blogs. For your newsgroups and other things. I've faced this problem for almost 25 years as the net gave me more and more things I read on a very regular basis.

When I was running ClariNet, my long-term goal list always included a system that would attempt to judge the importance of a story as well as its topic areas. I had two goals in mind for this. First, you could tune how much news you wanted about a particular topic in ordinary reading. By setting how iportant each topic was to you, a dot-product of your own priorities and the importance ratings of the stories would bring to the top the news most important to you. Secondly, the system would know how long it had been since you last read news, and could dial down the volume to show you only the most important items from the time you were away. News could also simply be presented in an importance order and you could read until you got bored.

There are options to do this for non-news, where professional editors would rank stories. One advantage you get when items (be they blog posts or news) get old is you have the chance to gather data on reading habits. You can tell which stories are most clicked on (though not as easily with full RSS feeds) and also which items get the most comments. Asking users to rate items is usually not very productive. Some of these techniques (like using web bugs to track readership) could be privacy invading, but they could be done through random sampling.

I propose, however, that one way or another popular, high-volume sites will need to find some way to prioritize their items for people who have been away a long time and regularly update these figures in their RSS feed or other database, so that readers can have something to do when they notice there are hundreds or even thousands of stories to read. This can include sorting using such data, or in the absence of it, just switching to headlines.

It's also possible for an independent service to help here. Already several toolbars like Alexa and Google's track net ratings, and get measurements of net traffic to help identify the most popular sites and pages on the web. They could adapt this information to give you a way to get a handle on the most important items you missed while away for a long period.

For E-mail, there is less hope. There have been efforts to prioritize non-list e-mail, mostly around spam, but people are afraid any real mail actually sent to them has to be read, even if there are 1,000 of them as there can be after two weeks away.