The idea was that we finally got away from gatekeepers and had access to whatever news sources we wanted. We wouldn’t want to trade that for black box algorithms that bubbled certain news up to the top without us knowing how or why.

For example, if you rely on (or just use) Google news, you have no idea why a certain story is highlighted over one that may have a different slant. At least in the past you kinda knew a certain publication was more liberal or conservative and took that into consideration.

Now, we rely heavily on our social networks to do a good amount of filtering but it seems the users are still looking for more filters. Once we do accept a filter of any kind, I think it’s important to know how that filter works since it may ever so subtly (or heavily) affect what information we pay attention to.

That lead me to think it would be cool to replace or even mix and match filters and REALLY cool if some of the filters were open source.

Which led me to competition on filters and then to VRM.

So we all have a stream. How about an open standard or modular way to apply filters to whatever stream we expose to them.

I think the education field might have a helpful answer with rubrics, a defined way of scoring things.

Once we have a defined way of scoring things (which itself should be open and flexible), third parties can now compete on whether we allow them to filter out stream.

Pop in the New York Times filter, or the Dave Winer algorithm, or Twitter Social Graph plugin. Some will be human edited, others completely algorithmic. Some will rely on our social graphs, others lean toward Semantic Web algorithms.

If you end up not liking it, try another.

The point is that in the future of news, if any editing is to happen, the control of that editing needs to flip to the user side. We need third parties to help us, but we need to know how so, or at least be able to toggle that control.