I have not considered your idea of servers where users can create their own access-controlled groups [...]
One of the properties of traditional Usenet I don't like is that creating groups isn't a matter of minutes, but a matter of days or weeks. If we want an NNTP-based alternative to blogs, twitter and reddit, we can't have that. Instead, a user should just get control of a namespace managed by the server he's registered with.
Also note, you could have multiple interfaces if wanted: HTML, RSS, email [...]
That's a very important part of the equation: The server should auto-generate HTML pages and RSS feeds for the messages to allow seemless integration into the WWW. Let the power user use their news reader, but don't deny access to the 'layperson'.
Namespaces is an idea that I have considered, and I have defined a kind of namespacing called "Unusenet", which uses "un" followed by the number of components of the domain name that the namespace belongs to, a reverse domain name, and then the rest of the components. The domain name is normally the domain name of the server where the newsgroup originated; if it is then federated with other servers, they use the original domain name for that newsgroup and not their own. (For example, a newsgroup originating on "example.org" named "misc.xyzzy" will have the full name "un2.org.example.misc.xyzzy".) This is what I have on my own NNTP server. (You do not have to use the Unusenet convention, but I use it in order to avoid namespace collision.) However, I currently have no "feeds" or "blogs", but only "forums"; if I do implement a blog then I would probably implement in that way, though (and as I already mentioned, this was even my idea before you mentioned it; we just happen to have the same idea). But I run my own server rather than using those of others. Of course, not all users will want that, but that is why they can have a server where users can create their own access-controlled groups in a namespace in a few minutes easily like you mentioned.
One of the properties of traditional Usenet I don't like is that creating groups isn't a matter of minutes, but a matter of days or weeks. If we want an NNTP-based alternative to blogs, twitter and reddit, we can't have that. Instead, a user should just get control of a namespace managed by the server he's registered with.
Also note, you could have multiple interfaces if wanted: HTML, RSS, email [...]
That's a very important part of the equation: The server should auto-generate HTML pages and RSS feeds for the messages to allow seemless integration into the WWW. Let the power user use their news reader, but don't deny access to the 'layperson'.