I think this is an awesome idea and I'd like to support it however I can. One of the things I'm working on today is building a witness information section into steemstats to help show users what witnesses are all about.
One thing I'd like to see (related to your proposed witness updates) is a specific tag on each of them, say #witness-update. I could then watch for posts by witnesses that match these tags, giving users an interface showing who the witnesses are and what they are up to (with links to their posts).
I also approve of this increased transparency and call for votes occasionally. As a developer who has recently devoted the better part of my time to developing improvements in the steem ecosystem, I'd like to know who I'm witnessing and what they're doing too.
#witness-category is used for historical reasons ;-)
Doesn't mean we can't use em both! I guess I figured that #witness-category was used for everything witness related, I was looking for a tag that was specific to their regular updates without any noise. But now that I've browsed through it a bit, it seems quiet enough that it could be used :)