Broadly speaking, though, I think you’re missing the point on maybe two levels.

First level. I resist comparison to libraries. News mostly isn’t libraries. News mostly isn’t scientific research. Which is not to say that news–or what I’ll call “news,” for lack of a better term–is vapid gossip. It ranges between those two extremes. And in that range, I believe we care about what people say and what is said abut them. It’s conversational. See here for background on how a parable of the fishing village can help us reorient ourselves to what’s fundamentally important about the news:

http://networkednews.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/thinking-the-unthinkable-parable-of-the-future-of-news/

My sense is that news is a social thing, a stratum of information in which people form groups, identities, and other bonds. Now, is it all conversation? No, of course not. It’s often research, like that done in a library. But news–again, very broadly speaking–has a special kind of social life that obtains between people around the water cooler or on twitter. That social life is horizontal; it’s one-to-one and one-to-many, very many times over.

Second level. I agree that you don’t want, and can’t handle all of (3)–which, if you recall, comprises health care news that others have shared with Robert Reich, whether via twitter or otherwise. Fine, but you’re (understandably) taking me to be saying more than I really am (don’t worry, I ain’t mad).

So let me be clear(er). I think you do want the health care news to which my tweets that mention Robert Reich point. I think you do want the health care news to which Paul Krugman’s tweets that mention Robert Reich point. In other words, you care about some of (3).

If there were a good way to establish expertise or “trustedness” on a topic (like health care or medicine or politics), you might want health care news to which such experts’ tweets that mention Robert Reich point. And I do think there’s a good way to establish such expertise. In fact, this very system of following does just that. (See tunkrank for background: http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/. You don’t lack the math chops.)

The fact that someone reveals a preference for health care news from Paul Krugman indicates that someone trusts Krugman on health care. If you repeat that many times over–i.e., with enough people independently following users A, B, and C on topics X, Y, and Z–you’ve got socially networked content recommendation engine. And that’s pretty cool–far-out, sure, but cool, imho.

I hope this helps a bit!

The idea that (1), (2) and (3) are all the same seems to me a lot like saying that library search engines should not ask you specify whether you want to search “by author” or ‘by subject.” But that specification is super (even perhaps plus duper) helpful? If I want articles about the awards Paul Krugman has won, it’s less helpful to run a search that also pulls up all the articles Krugman himself has written. Likewise, if I want to research what Krugman’s written, it’s not helpful to run a search that also pulls up every article that mentions him in any way.

Let’s not quibble about the ultimate goals of human activity! Perhaps my invocation of ends and means suggested that I’m interested in the metaphysics of motivation, following Kant. I assure you: I am humbler than that. A little. My point is relevant in the realm of ordinary life.

Games are better when their graphics are better. If a company wants to rule the market in video games, I would argue that its most important problem is graphics. Story lines are important, as are game dynamics, but I suspect that life-like murders are the main driver of sales. (I’m horribly, derisively bad at video games, btw, and have been for the better part of two decades, roughly since Contra.)

But news is still mostly text. Twitter didn’t blow up as the central distribution system for news because it looks better than email or google reader. Radically simple text files distributed across asymmetric graphs built from the stuff users care about––people, topics, locations, events––own the news today, hands down, and will for very many tomorrows (imho). Do we also want a few pictures? Sure, we’ll take ‘em; they’re beautiful and can complete the job that text starts. But if we want to fundamentally improve the user’s news experience of news, we’ve got to make that graph easier to explore and manipulate. Dead-simple visualization can make those graphs user-friendly––as long as there’s never, ever any obnoxious public reference to “asymmetric” anything.

You throw silobreaker in with the rest, but I think they (network search specifically) are a good example of the type of visualization that could actually be useful. I agree that it’s not user friendly. But they’re certainly in the means category rather than the ends. And something like that, done right, has the potential to add a nice new dimension to news browsing.

2. You’re wrong. The point of video games isn’t the graphics. Nobody just sits there and looks at the images. The point is the game: winning, losing, having fun.

3. You’re kind of right. Flash isn’t the end of graphics technology. There will be LOTS of great new platforms as connectivity continues to improve. But very very few non-Flash graphics stuff is currently working. Do you want to spend your time building a news site, or proving a new graphics standard?