For ages now I have subscribed to the newest things RSS feed, but the
volume of entries is too high and signal to noise ratio too low for me
to follow any more.

I use yahoo pipes to manage and filter other feeds I follow, and have
been playing around with some way to use it to get a better stream of
new things.

My initial attempts at filtering the actual newest things feed didn't
really do well, partially due to insufficient RSS fields (like
categories, tags, tools, number of files, etc) to allow anything more
sophisticated than filtering on keywords. I thought about just merging
the "things I designed" feeds of several users who's designs I like,
but that doesn't help discover one-off cool items from new designers.

Here's a reasonably good alternative I've found. The concept is
instead to merge the "liked things" feeds of several users who's
interests coincide with your own - add enough users that you get
pretty good coverage of things without too much unwanted stuff. The
standard "featured things" feed could be included there too.

I've published an example one at:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=82e9bf9e35c0ab75686774a89e...
that you should clone and adapt to your own needs by adding feeds and
filter criteria to match your own preferences.

Any other interesting strategies for finding/following the cool stuff
welcomed...

Cheers,
Len.