Newsweek's signal/noise ratio

Yet another cool web thing that I just now learned about: While browsing Newsweek's web site, I ran across a feature called "Signal or Noise?" It's impressively straightforward: They suggest a topic and you can use a slider to indicate how relevant (signal) or irrelevant (noise) the topic is. They in turn will presumably use that information in deciding how far to run with the topic.

Reader feedback has been around forever, but having that level of feedback available in real time is something that's only practical on the web. I've long since decided I have no idea what Web 2.0 actually means, but if it's to do with taking advantage of the social nature of the web and letting information flow in all directions instead of just from the server to the browser, the signal/noise widget seems as much in that spirit as anything [and like so many web.experiments, it seems to be gone already, or at least the link is broken now --DH 27 April 2011].