Frustration over N900 noise lead to a discussion of a new forum in this thread:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=44479&page=17

From my perspective, I have tried Reggie's trick of subscribing to subforums. This allows me to see new posts in forums I care about. Then I subscribe to threads I care about. This works great for the N810 and OS2008 forums. However, with other forums the N900 content is still too much. For example, "Applications" has very heavy N900 content.

There is also an app purported to be very useful called "AppWatch", but it takes up a lot of space and so may be off-limits to those who haven't cloned their OS.

So I humbly suggest that, while the current solutions are very helpful, they are not enough.