A fresh wave of angst regarding webfeed information overload seems to be rippling through the blogsphere again. 37Signals' Mark Linderman proposes a couple of broad ways of filtering feeds: relying on publishers, relying on community, relying on friends, relying on a smarter client aggregator. The extensive comments on Linderman's post are worthy of examination as well.
From reading these types of discussions for a few years, I have one observation and one comment. The observation is that there are quite observable variations in behavior for both publishing and reading. Rigorously academic study to come up with some usefully discrete points in the spectrum would be a good project. Thus, you can immediately dismiss statements of the form, "The solution to information overload is...". Well no, there is no singular solution. Any solution is really dependent on a reader's context.
My comment is that folks almost uniformly focus on filtering, or reducing the amount of content delivered. Assume that feeling overloaded is the normal state and can never be eliminated. There's always too much stuff. Then wouldn't devising new ways of organizing, presenting, and navigating the deluge be an easier pursuit of larger benefit? Besides, throwing stuff away might be harmful, potentially eliminating larger contextual signals.
I'll also argue that overload is normal because most people are always irrationally afraid that they will "miss" something, even though they can never get a guarantee they won't. To compensate, they subscribe to "too many" sources. Also, having many sources increases the potential for serendipity, which is another effect innately sought after.