Rant about an "Issue Aggregator"

When at BarCampWellingtonNZEGov, I had occasion to have a bit of a rant about an aggregator that was required for enhanced citizen participation in e-government.

I just saw Jason Ryans post about Media Monitoring over at The Network of Public Sector Communicators, where he talked about the open source

BuzzMonitor which can do some of this aggregation (maybe all of it). I am republishing my comment here.

I was suggesting a news aggregator (similar to news.google.com) that could bring government/authoritative and private space comments together to provide a common view of the various sides to an issue. Ranging up and down the long tail to provide visiblilty to the Transit NZ discussions in Auckland over roads and equally apply to the liver bellied spotted newt's wildlife sanctuary proposed for just west of the median barrier on highway one north of Foxton.

Buzzmonitor seems to be a very good start to that aggregator. I plan to have a play with it myself.

I have thought harder on the problem and see major problems in my idea, among them :
The inherent bias of the 'controlling' entity, The difficulty in defining the issue accurately without misrepresentation. The lack of enough visibility into the authoritative government sites (my assumption, sorry to government web masters out there).

I suppose they are all solvable, likely by a bit of magic "Wisdom of the Crowds" fairydust, but for someone with more free time than me.