These days we’re all flooded with information.  If you were to read everything that everyone in your online community shared in a week, you wouldn’t get anything done.

However, your peers are sharing useful information, so what’s a good way to strike a balance between missing out and reading too much?

We think that one answer is smarter design.  We’ve recently built a simple peer-to-peer newsletter into each group’s page on QiqoChat, and we placed an interesting constraint on everyone’s participation: yup, you guessed it– people can share up to one link per week.

We expect this will filter out a great deal of noise while allowing the important news to get through.  You can try out this newsletter feature on the demo site (scroll down when you get there).  It’s quick and easy to add, edit, and delete your announcements, and these announcements are cleanly bundled into one weekly newsletter to everyone in the group.

What other techniques have you found for helping online communities cut through the news and stay updated with the most important news?  Here are a few that we’ve run across:

• Blog: Publishing a list of top posts for the month
• Online Groups: A welcome post that is pinned to the top of the list and points people in the right direction
• Email Discussion Lists: Creating a periodic blog post which summarizes and links to the most energetic discussions