How is it possible that, despite Google, bloggers, and the power of the Fourth Estate, all the news aggregation models suck?
What I really, really want to see is a highly competitive tag-subscription framework. A user is subscribed to a set of plaintext tags. Content-producers tag their content (if they don't, it doesn't get seen, unless some magnanimous user assigns tags for them).
In the naive model*, users see everything that carries their tag. I'm intentionally excluding user-specific heuristics. Of course, this model results in too much content on popular tags, so users respond to poor articles and excessive volume with a "thumbs down" on articles, removing them from the stream**. In this way, users curate the stream in a very cutthroat way.
The most popular (and simple) tags come to naturally reflect mainstream tastes, but subcultures and content-producers alike have an interest in getting content into alternate streams, especially given the self-limiting "bandwidth" of popular tag streams. Alternate tags grow, with different user expectations about content. These tags might have weird names, such as "warren-alt" or "deficit-progressive", but they would be promulgated via 1) social networks, and 2) the presence of such tags on popular content.
This approach facilitates the rapid creation and identification of disparate media markets rooted in positions and subcultures. Tags are flexible, in that they not only allow you to get desirable content by category, but they also 1) permit identification with a subculture/market, 2) allow users to selectively subscribe to individual stories, possibly creating a much stronger revenue model for following up on older stories (improving journalism as a whole).
Google+ doesn't do this today, but Google and G+ are great candidates for this model, and it sounds like content-producers like you are in an increasingly better position to negotiate a good model for digital distribution.
Thanks for reading.
*You can imagine a more complicated model where consumption-heavy users or a random subset of users see unvetted content, but I wouldn't want this to be strong enough to interfere with the value of a globally identical stream.
**The ease with which an article could be removed from the stream could be based on content-producer reputation (i.e. How many successful (long-lived) articles a content-producer has published to the stream.)
