Eric Rice (left), responding to Dana's Law of Content, asked a real good question yesterday:

And who will be the ultimate judge of what is and is not good and compelling?

The short answer is you would. Not you, Eric. You. The person reading this. And you. And you.

The biggest problem blogging faces right now is it's hard to find the good stuff. Oh, much of the good stuff does get found. And, of course, what constitutes good stuff is all in the eye of the beholder.

What do we do about this?

In the beginning, way back in 2002, we had the blogroll. Tools like Blogstreet counted the number of blogs which "rolled" your blog by posting permanent links to the side of the content. By counting rolls from top-rated blogrolls more highly than those from newbies, you had something like Google's PageRank.

But you didn't.

Then there was Technorati. Technorati ranks by links. So many links from so many other blog sources. This blog, for instance, counts 186 links from 139 sources. Sounds great, only the 100th-rated blog, Oliver Willis, has 2,417 links from 1,779 sources.

It's very difficult to rise or fall fast in either of these rankings without help from the major media. Many of the Technorati Top 100 now appear regularly on TV. Others were built by media buzz.

I have no objection to this per se. It's one of the law of numbers. First-mover advantage means that, as the market grows, your piece of the market grows with it, so long as you don't make a complete ass of yourself.

But neither of these tools tells you where the good stuff is right now. At best, they tell you where you can most likely find some good stuff.

The market is wide open for a database tool that will help us identify good items faster, based on what our individual interests. We have a host of good tries, like Bloglines, and RSS readers like Newsgator, which aim to let you track an interest.

But that's still not good enough.

Here is a suggestion, and understand that I'm not a programmer, I just talk to a lot of them.

RSS is based on XML. XML is a set of tags whose meaning we agree to honor through a parser. RSS was extended to Podcasts by simply adding the equivalent of an object tag, and now you can find Podcasts by subject fairly easily.

How about creating rank tags. You read something that parses these tags and rank the item. You create two entries -- one that I read it, one here's what I thought.

Then you use these tags, in a database, to rate individual entries. They could rate blog entries, they could rate Podcasts, they could even rate VideoBlog and PhotoBlog entries. Each item already has a time stamp, and this information could also be brought into the mix, so that the rank of an item would be based on how long it's been up, how often it's been accessed, and what people thought of it. Cross-reference against all the other existing tags items like this draw, and then display the results like Google News does.

How do you build a business model around this? I have some ideas, but I'd rather hear yours first. So please feel free to offer them. I'm listening.