Scanning around the foreign policy blogosphere over the last few days has been illuminating and disturbing at the same time. Leave the niche blogs serving issues you know are important to you, and you're in the wilderness, being bombarded with Alberto Gonzales this-and-that and what feels to most Americans like the 100th congressional vote on something akin to finding a way to locate a path to open the door to go down the hallway to get on the bus to get to the train station to leave Iraq.

But late last week, FP's Passport blog ran down a couple items you might have missed, including dire developments in Pakistan (where instability, whether you think Musharraf is evil or not, put nuclear weapons into play in a bad way), and more bad news from Darfur.

What about the devastating attack on civil liberties at the hands of the FBI? Marauding gangs in Rio's favelas? The rise of Talibanistan?

There isn't a channel for all this information, but maybe there should be. Perhaps we need a system (there must be a relatively easy way to engineer this) where news that is tagged as dominant -- say the latest on Anna Nicole Smith's autopsy/childcare arrangements, or the rabbit-hole histrionics about how bad (or wonderful!) things are in Iraq -- is omitted. What's left are all the things that have been obscured from view, like say this item about how global warming will upend everything we know about climate zones today (bye-bye polar regions!) or John Bolton's confession that he actively sought to prolong the war in Lebanon last summer, giving him enormous satisfaction (he said he was "damned proud") and personal responsibility for lives lost.

We could call this whatyouremissing.com. The internet is full of tools, from Digg to Technorati to all those "Most Emailed" lists on every news site, for making sure you see what everyone else sees. They have a purpose, and at their best they can help you find something that other folks like yourself have been reading. But at their worst, I believe they can contribute to a trimming of the information universe. Low ranked, low-visited items could just be boring. But I think there's probably a likelihood that they're merely not what the herd is reading. Who doesn't want to know what the herd missed?