Daily Mashup - popular = good?

As anyone who has spent much time on social content web sites (flickr, delicious, etc.) knows, or takes for granted, popular does equal good. I’m not making philosophical claims but practical ones. If many people put a bookmark or photo in their personal collection it’s pretty likely that it’s useful or at least interesting. This is not quantifiable (well, perhaps, if someone wants to take that on) but it’s easy to experience for yourself on these sites.

The Daily Mashup really has something good going on. It’s just a combination of Flickr Interesting, Delicious & Furl popular and Yahoo news most clicked. A simple daily internet zeitgeist. If I didn’t have lots of things to get done I’d make it my home page.

I’d love to have a customizable version of this with lots of display options for any feed view full text, mash up with other feeds in a cloud, pick out the popular things within several tag feeds, and so on with a nice fast ajax interface. Maybe I’ll hack something together until this exists.

To clarify, I don’t think this should be anyone’s sole interface to the web leading to tyranny of the masses. Search is still incredibly valuable & someone has to put these sites on the map in the first place and when you’re talking about specific tags you can find the rare gems also.