1. Citizens are hemorrhaging personal information on the Web.
2. Others are profiting from it.
3. Citizens need to gain control of that information.
4. Maybe there’s a role for media companies to help them take back that information and get a slight profit.

And Aron, Newsmixer is a cool development. The Cedar Rapids Gazette’s Steve Buttry was live tweeting a demo of it today.

It sounds like he’s trying to create something like a Facebook for news but with a subscriber model. Might work, but, again, lots of free options in this space — including Facebook, which has a splendid API.

You should also check out Newsmix (http://newsmixer.us/), which launched yesterday. This is a class project by Rich Gordon’s developer/journalist students at Medill, which mixes Facebook like sharing and commentary/conversation with news. (It actually uses Facebook Connect, as a matter of fact.)

A little rough around the edges right now, and it needs a bit of IA love. But it’s an interesting idea along the lines of IVP, with tons of potential. There are bits and pieces of it I’d like to steal right now.

1)An Internet interface that would be a one-stop shop for all registrations on the Web (no more endless filling out of user-registration forms);

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a trustworthy, safe and secure place where privacy worries would disappear;

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and a news and information site that would provide local news obtainable nowhere else.

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In Tom’s example, though, it’s not really much of a step from reporting the facts to facilitating community solutions. The Freep story could stand for tens of thousands of newspaper investigations whose underlying premise was that we’ve uncovered an untenable situation that cries out for a remedy. How many more of them could have avoided the standard fate of oblivion had newspapers been able, and willing, to use modern networking tools to take further steps toward eliminating the problem? I wrote about this objectivity question in a somewhat different context for USC’s Center on Communication Leadership.

As I indicated there, I have qualms about moving away from this model, but I have bigger ones about not taking the advice Tom offers to create robust communities of interest and action. The old framework of newsrooms reporting the facts and then washing hands needs some work.

For one, OpenID seems to finally be starting to take hold just a little bit. At least I’m noticing more and more sites that support the standard, which cuts down significantly on the constant login/logout hassle.

Second, there’s a number of companies in the identity field, including Dick Hardt’s Sxip, which, among other things, provides a free browser extension (Sxipper) that handles registration forms for you securely on a site-by-site basis.

That said, I think the inclination to innovate outside the traditional news realm is spot on, even if this particular product might be tough to sell when so much is available for free.

Be interesting to put a bunch of news/techie types in a room for a week or with one requirement: Come up with an innovative, potentially money-making venture NOT related to news. (Alan Mutter thinks it’s worth a try, anyway — http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2007/11/ventilating-chinese-wall.html).