When reviewing the class blog, one can see that most of our news stories come from very few sources. Major examples being, Wired.com, Slashdot.org, CNN.com, and other major news sources. This means, that by the time I read an article online, and then go to check the blog to post about it, *someone* has already beaten me to it, by a matter of minutes. This is an increasingly frustrating phenomenon. Thus I figured, I would write about the small segment of news sources that all of our stories come from.

Thus what I am questioning would be does all critical news end up on these sites? How can one find unique information from all these sources, or rather, how can one compile the most information from the various sources. That is to say for example, reading an article on yahoo.com and then reading the news article on the same story from CNN.com, how similar are they and how would you rate one as more informative than another. While the entire premise of news and news articles are the opinions of the writer, there must be some way to differentiate which news stories are more “worthy” than others. So in the future, when I want to compile many news sources together, I can pick some sort of criteria (more factual than opinion, etc.) for the type of news stories that I so desire. My basis here is based on a different approach than RSS feeds, which just feed you all news. I am trying to suggest a more detailed system.

A random thought would be are we creating our own information cascade? I mean, I read the same news sources as many other students do, and pick an article that I find interesting either independently at first but then on the basis of not picking something that was already discussed on the blog. I can see the decisions of all previous people and make a decision based on that. Does that mean we’ll go through all the interesting news with enough students participating in this blog? We already have repetition in some ways of information.

An interesting look on news sources can be found on this website which shows the sources of the news stories from the Google News page. It also does a ranking and score based on a few factors such as prominence on the Google news page, number of appearances, and etc. to estimate referrer traffic to the source. I found this site on www.searchengineshowdown.com which is a search engine user guide. Thus this site already sort of implements a system of ranking that might be useful into integrating into some portal where I as a user could decide how I want to see my news. Do you think this is the way of the future of online news? Or will we be doomed with too many sources and not enough strategies to break it down into segments worth reading? ( Based on what you consider worth reading? )