PageRank and new content

Finding interesting and original content is time consuming. As pointed by recent studies the most popular blogs aren't necessarly the ones with the most original content.

And I agree that is what makes some blogs useful, they act as filters and give you pointers to articles you wouldn't have found. The blogosphere has become a giant neural network that filters/ranks pages that are new or not yet well-known and reconfigures itself by evolving blogrolls.
Although this works, it shows the limitations of PageRank and other machine-based relevancy engines, at least those that run over the whole internet, when it comes to new content.

Sometimes, what you want is to find content that is relevant to your interests, but not part of your daily feeds and not yet popular.
I've been trying Feedster "search feeds" lately: when you perform a Feedster search, you can subscribe to the results using a feed to receive new search results.

So far I've found this a pretty good solution, as it finds new content on sites that you don't regularly read and before it gets ranked by google or the blogosphere. The signal to noise ratio is not great, but not that much worse than on some other human generated feeds.

The main downside is that if you subscribe to multiple searchs on related terms, you'll receive a single item via multiple feeds. But this should be rather easy to solve at the aggregator level, for example by using the permalinks as identifiers.

I've run into the same problem (finding content relevant to my interest yet not on my daily list). del.icio.us is an interesting solution. Sort of combines the popularity aspect of PR with tagging (and the ability to search on those tags). I am usually guaranteed to find some new and relevant content on there.