10,000 Brilliant Ideas

I want a reputable news service to send me by text the top 20-30 news stories of the year as soon as it happens. At a time where news services become less and less relevant (reporting on tweets people send?) this is one way they could do something difficult to replace. (Yeah I know I already did this one )

Researchers never share. They want everyone else to share with them, but they never share. Well, they do want to share eventually (weee publish!), they just really don't want to be scooped. How do you fix this perverse situation of smart people? (full disclosure: I think I really don't like the whole archaic publishing process of current day academia. Maybe I'll find something down the road, but I feel like it's been long enough and I still don't really like it. (a)) - Create some incentive to reveal early what you're up to. Some kind of notoriety. Or, more excitingly - Create a news site that hunts down things investigative journalism style. As soon as someone starts a trial or anything scientific they're posted in the papers. Of course researchers could 'turn themselves in', which is what they'd start doing if the journalists were good at sniffing them out anyway. (a) Reasons I don't like the process. - It's gatekept by establishe...

I have a plethora of issues with the consumption of news network news. I don't trust news people to be competent or fair. By the time I get wind of a story I should really know about, I can only find stories about the ramifications caused by the byproducts of the actual event. And for the most part, I'm not that interested in the fluffity fluff that editors/directors have to fill their papers/newscasts/web pages with. For these reasons, I only have three news sources - Wikipedia, the Onion, and my friend Fred. I'm not sure really the answer to all of these problems, but this idea seeks to fix the fluffity fluff. What if you have a news feed that instead of based on importance rank (e.g. most important on the front page, next important below that, etc.), is based on inherent importance of the story. Let's say score is given 1 to 100. Riot in Egypt is given a 90+, Quiet Riot reunion tour a 2. How would the score be determined? I don't know. Google hits? A crow...