What if we just had sites and RSS-like aggregators? You could subscribe directly to the sources you like. You could then publish the aggregation. In turn you could subscribe to an aggregator, and perhaps even reaggregate their content, too. In this way we can have a distributed method of "following" content that we like.

Basically this vision is one where everyone run's Google Reader in their browser and, if you're really gung-ho, you republish via some VPS hosted thing. The structure is a little like DNS - a hierarchical database.