Steve Gillmore has an interesting and related point in his latest post, that can be found here:

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/10/02/for-your-eyes-only/

"Since Twitter went mainstream in the last year, micromessaging threads have become the main carrier of realtime news. Trending topics may seem the fundamental index, but information at the actionable level is carried in a smaller stream managed largely by retweets and overlapping follow clouds. A cascading series of Likes in the Friendfeed/Facebook nomenclature is far more efficient than other mechanisms, including email newsletters and RSS syndication.

This new brand of news is more CNBC than MSNBC. It’s based on a “what’s in it for me” dynamic, which prioritizes the flow based on business implications first, followed by political and social impact."