Gary Price conducted an excellent interview with Findory's founder, Gregory Linden. Lots of good insights into where Findory started, where it's going, and the difference between personalization and customization. I'm a big fan of Linden's approach to machine assistance. Don't bother asking users to do anything. They won't do it, or they'll do it wrong, or they won't keep information fresh. The only hope is that they'll buy into letting you observe their behavior.
One point I'll quibble with is that "old news is no news". This is an issue I have with a lot of personal information management systems. Retrospection is higher order thinking that could be stimulated by many of these tools. To the extent that old news is around, is filterable, and can be summarized, looking at old news can put current news in context. I think this is also an element of "finding what you want", where what I want is some deeper insight and perspective on a topic.
Thinking out loud and not completely in tune with the article but hey... What if someone wrote a set of retrospection plugins for a popular blogging tool, say Movable Type, that just analyzed the blog archives and presented overviews and visualizations of the flow, warp, and woof of the writing. Or in the Findory case something similar using my reading history to give me a sense of what I've actually been tracking over time.