How about creating a portlet and RSS feed that pull regular Google News search results on a search topic that the user picks? Google has this service implemented as an email alert at
http://www.google.com/newsalerts. You can see two RSS implementations at
http://voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php and
http://eurohost.webmatrixhosting.net/rajivraj/google/googlerss.html.
The idea would be to create service whereby users can pick a term and choose to have the results delivered on a user-configurable timed basis (e.g., hourly, daily, etc.) to a portlet, an RSS feed, an email alert, or any combination thereof. You'd have to think a bit about how to make the interface intuitive, but OpenACS needs to solve this problem anyway. Plus, if you did it right, the portlet interface could lay the groundwork for a more general RSS aggregator module.
