Here's my idea pitch...

Do you think Website Owners should be able to choose the order of which there site results appear for certain phrases in Google? For example, say if you searched for my name in Google, and a popular blog post of mine appeared before my homepage, and I wanted to switch the results around?

Writing this now I can lots of flaws in the idea, and only some benefits (advantages mainly lying with the control available to webmasters). So, could this be a decent feature in Webmaster Tools?

I'll just throw in some points webmasters can already influence in display of their site:
- they can exclude certain pages via robots.txt, e.g. exclude their resume so it won't pop up before their homepage
- they can tell Google not to use the DMOZ description, by using the NOODP meta info

Also, they can suggest "priority" via the Sitemaps protocol, though Google emphasizes this only affects indexing, never ranking...

In general, the problem I have with these things is that I need to either invest additional work, or ignore these specifications (like Sitemaps protocol) and feel like I'm issing out on something potentially important (example: you can choose to be part in the Image Labeler game via Google Webmaster Tools – why do I have to check this for all my sites?). From the search engine's perspective on the other hand I feel these features given to webmasters may limit them in the future. What if Google decides that the snippet from DMOZ is so much more relevant to users? Now that they offered webmasters a way to influence this, it's not easy to just "take back control".

I wish search engines would take care of all this stuff and I as webmaster just care about laying out my sites in ways that make sense, writing content the way it makes sense, creating HTML the way the W3C says, and so on...

The hard part with the web now is people like to put your content on other sites which creates duplicate content on the web. Philip remember how I was able to find your full CSS tips article on at least 5 different sites. Now the problem you could have is what happens if one of those sites has a higher PageRank than your site. Will your content on that site be listed before your own site which had the original article? If that did happen, What could you do about it? Right now, I don't think you have many options on trying to outrank a different site that has your content even though it originated on your own site.

Google webmaster console will allow you to specify if you want the WWW or non WWW version of your site in Google's index. It also allows you to see all of the different links that point to your site. You can manage your sitemaps as well as see how the Googlebot is handling your site. The problem though is you can't tell Google that the original content on your site is more important than copies of that content that might be on other sites. This would be a cool feature to have but pretty hard to implement.

I'm not sure I'd have released a full-feed RSS if this site had a very low PageRank, because of exactly that problem. As you say, the problem isn't so much the dozens of shadow blogs, the problem is when those all outrank your blog. But I think by cutting your RSS feed to introductions only, you can avoid many of those blogs, right?

Yeah, just using introductions in an RSS feed should help if other people post your RSS data on their own website. This is one of those things that can fill up a search engine with duplicate content if its not handle correctly by their algorithm. One example that bugs me, is Open directory (dmoz.org) data being copied to so many different sites. So if I do a search I see the same data but the other sites are there for ad revenue only. They bring nothing new to the user.