Where I totally agree is the "Swarm" intelligence is superior to an individual philosophy. The same thing is dictating our thought process as well. Here: http://frrole.com/about-us
Where I again think differently is the 140 chars vs. the linked article line of thought. Grant that maybe we should call this "social headlines for your city" instead of "social newspaper..." ( 140 chars make for perfectly good headlines) but I believe that the information overload today is increasing drastically, attention span therefore (and otherwise) is decreasing significantly; so much so that more content, specially textual, is not the answer. Less content in fact is the answer, but chosen intelligently enough so that it does not leave things out.
Where I definitely agree with gayakwad is that these are fantastic inputs, the kind of inputs one definitely expects on HN. See from your profile that your areas of interest too are those that we are working on (Frrole is a lot, LOT more than no of retweets btw), maybe we should talk offline?
Input: X = country, Y = city, tweets from twitter
For each X scan last N million tweets that have a link to a web-site, output M most linked domains (Facebook.com, techcrunch.com, cnn.com, wsj.com, etc) - this gives you a base for news feeds customized for every country
For each Y in X, scan last n thousand tweets that have a link to a web-page, output m most linked web-pages that are hosted on M domains for Y country - this gives you the "social news paper for Y city in X country"
Parameters M and N prevent spamming and shape long term trends. Parameters n and m give you short term trends, which in essence are the "swarm" intelligence about which articles are worth reading for a given city in a given country. The value here is a time saver of what is worth reading to keep up with your community.
Note to self: could be a data mining web app