I'm thinking something like an 'ET-weekly' approach. A process that would allow especially good 'articles' from the week prior exposure to new users. My first thought is a new editorial process of sorts, a second 'recommend diary' button to support the promotion of the article to 'ET-weekly' exposure. This button would be a responsibility of the users (trusted users?), to steer content to this hypothetical audience. For example, this particular diary, though important to the ET community, would probably not be a good candidate for the 'weekly' since it is perhaps not of extreme interest to a newcomer. One would ask users to think not about "what is important to you?", but "what do you think would be good to show off to a newcomer?" It also allows for a category of "infrequent reader" who can interact with the cream of ET that has deliciously floated to the top during the past week.

This would work very well with if we make Scoop display for each user a page with "responses to your comments" and some organisation by whether that user has read the response or responded to it, as suggested by MillMan in the "Random site redesign thoughts" diary.