Human information filtering, the future?

Scott Karp on Pubblishing2 has an insightful follow-up on the discussion started from Scoble's post on how "Techmeme, Mahalo, and Facebook will beat Google". Scott opens up the concept of human driven information filtering on the web.

What really caugh my eye was the following line " We couldn’t agree more (the part about the “human touch” adding a lot of value). Algorithms are fast and can cover a lot more ground than individual human, but they lack a fundamental human gift — judgment."

To me both approaches to filtering information have a place in the future of the web and just recently we have started to recognize the power of human filtering because of user numbers of services approaching critical mass. As computing becomes ubiquitous and the masses are accessing the web all the time, from anywhere, the power of human filtering will just get stronger.

Algorithm based filtering will have their place in precision and brute-force, but human driven filtering will create more rich and accessible information. Algorithms will never challenge or re-direct your views, but human filtered information can. The evolution path of these two information filtering approaches will be an interesting story.