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December 29, 2006

Blogs Are the Real News Message Boards

Yahoo decided to take down message boards from Yahoo News. The reason? "Message boards allowed a small number of vocal users to dominate the discussion." Or, as a Slashdot comment says...
Imagine, if you will, Michael Richards, high on drugs, screaming "NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER I HATE NIGGERS" over and over again for hours and hours. Add to that an evangelic Christian screaming "FIND CHRIST" at the top of his lungs, once every 45 minutes precisely. Finally, imagine an overweight 40-year old divorced mother crying and saying "why is everybody so mean". This is what the Yahoo boards were like.

Earlier this year, Yahoo removed blog search from Yahoo News. In a reverse direction, Google integrated blog search into Google News, added a link on the homepage, and now Google Blog Search has more visits than Technorati.

While there are still many spam blogs, search engines should focus on detecting them and not decide to ignore blogs. The real news discussion is not in news articles, it's in blogs, comments and forums. Blogs are permanently connected, interactive and more honest. Newspapers and traditional news sites realized that and now a lot of news come from blogs.

I think Google shouldn't stop at adding a link to blog search in Google News. They should try to connect news articles with blog posts and add more interactivity. The great thing about blogs is that they make you feel a part of the news as it happens.

4 comments:

  1. "Many news"? LOL, I love it when media types use the word "news" as a plural noun :)

    http://www.usingenglish.com/quizzes/answers.php?id=246

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  2. I corrected the mistake. I'm not a native English speaker, so I make mistakes. In my native language, "news" is a countable noun, so probably that's why I wrote something that stupid.

    Happy News Year! :)

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  3. Great observation, and suggestion. It would be great to see Google work on tying news article with blog posts - maybe in a similar manner to what technorati is doing with a number of news sources.

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  4. Exactly. Bloggers are more honest. I get more facts from Blogs than other forms of News.

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