This is a problem I've been batting around in various forms over the last several years, most recently with my "Weekly" Ruby and JavaScript newsletters. I've had a lot of encouraging e-mails and tweets from people who've "given up" on the chase for information and who are willing to trust me to curate the 10-20 most interesting stories in their niche. Long may this trend continue ;-)

At the thinner end of the wedge, though, are those information addicts. I worked on an auto-tagging system for developer content (live at http://coder.io/) for some time. It's turned out not to be as good as I had hoped (but at least I know why) but I'm not convinced that even developers are.. and I'm picking my words with trepidation here.. sophisticated enough to put together queries, filters or even collections of topics in the main.

Solely my opinion, though, but through these projects (and others) I'm finding folks prefer branded, curated digests of knowledge rather than filterable, 'queryable' firehoses. Either that, or I'm just better at providing the former ;-)