One of my mantras is to rely on others to filter my data in the social web, because the key to improving your signal to noise ratio is not to try and filter the noise, but actually to reduce your signal. That’s a lot harder than it sounds to do. But it’s made a lot easier by genuinely smart filterers like Dave Winer’s NewsJunk, which was an invaluable tool during the election season. Winer basically culled the best and most interesting news stories (by hand) and fed them to a dedicated RSS feed, which then fed into twitter. As a result I often briefed myself on the day’s politics by first checking @newsjunkies rather than wading into my mess of feeds on Google Reader cold. This is why i am genuinely sad to see that Winer is considering pulling the plug on NewsJunk now that the election has ended.