is this true that after the panda update, it is better to trim down excess content on a blog to get a higher ranking in serps. Just keep posts that get regular traffic and get rid of the rest? a couple of guys that i know did the same and shedded around 65% of their total blog posts, posts that were really old and didnt get much traffic. Do you guys think it would help?

anyone?

I doubt it would help.

It's very rare to find a high ranked page from years ago, but i do find the odd page or two from 5 or 10 years ago etc, so that shows that while Google does prefer newer content, the older content is still good if it is relevent.

Also you have to think about the linking between your pages. Some sites rank high because they have alot of links to other pages in their site - Cut out a decent portion of those links and you've just cut your site's strength, so i would expect that to make it more difficult to rank.
(As an example, on my authority site, after doing nothing for a few months i added some links to other pages on my site on certain articles, and soon after those pages had a small rise in rank for their keywords.)

Why would you delete posts from your blog? This will reduce its trust and authority rank to google. I think it will only give you lower rankings!