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Macro news. I get the news in my RSS feeds and its damn near useless.

These events tell me almost nothing about the world. The signal to noise ratio is not good. I don't want to know that another 6 people in iraq have been killed in some incident, I want to know whether the situation there is getting better or worse, is it happening in a new area than before, does it involve a new group of people...big picture stuff.

This is the kind of info you typically get from reading feature length editorials but I don't have the time.

I want big picture news and global trends, complete with graphs and visualisations to give me perspective on an issue, delivered to me in an RSS feed.

Also I want to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe to different issues that I wish to follow from start to end.

Already exist?

Thinking about this a little bit more I can think of perhaps 3 ways a social network site can make a start:

1. People use it for its personal value and network value is built as a side effect. (del.icio.us, youtube, google, flickr, amazon).

2. The idea is so compelling people directly contribute to the network value (reddit, digg, wikipedia).

3. You initially populate your site with so much data that its immediately useful.

What have I missed or gotten wrong?

I'd love to see a lot more written about this and more sites analysed.

I'm guessing Reddit and Digg took off not such much because they are personally useful without other people there but because news is something that is constant, compelling, frequent, neverending and you could literally hang out there all day finding good information.

Where as sites that are attempting to do the cold start and involve something like reviews and recommendations on restaurants or other services that you only have need to look up occasionally would have a much harder time getting going without being personally useful in any way.

There seems to be a lot of sites attempting that these days. Anyone know some good tricks for overcoming this?