Jaimie Murdock:
My ideal publishing model wouldn’t be about circles of people, but streams of tagged content. If there existed a service where you could follow a person, but mute certain content streams (such as local events, politics, etc.), we’d have perfection.
Kind of like customizing by the individual user, not just a circle of users. I would like to make circles for “politics”, “technology” and then put people in those circles. When I select the politics circle, I get only the messages that person has flagged as politics. Or even better, the app can determine what the main message concept was and appropriately tag it behind-the-scenes.
The only issue I see with this is the tendency to distill people to specific categories based on what tags they use the most. It’s like John Gruber being the Apple guy because the majority of his content is viewed with Apple as a lens; but, he is known to enjoy baseball, politics, and other things that define him as an individual rather than a tag.