This is a bit off the topic of software development, but I find it fascinating, so please excuse the detour.

Bloggers bemoan Yahoo's role in writer's arrest. Blog: There's lots of buzz out there about a media watchdog group's claim that Yahoo provided information that helped Chinese officials... [CNET News.com]

That's so funny - one of the features of Radio Userland is that it lists current news stories from several major feeds, letting me perform a single click and turn it into a blog post. Voila, I'm a pretend newspaper!

Personally I find this a bit disturbing - are people signing up for feeds from bloggers to allow them to be their news filters, carefully applying their bias to whatever stories they want people to hear? Are we in a world where there are half a dozen sources of information, and there are vast armies of Winston Smiths manipulating feeds to fit their perspective?

Secondly, this story above details how "bloggers bemoan" (including some snippets from blogs, which is a pretty fragile basis of a news story), as if "bloggers" are some sort of collective consciousness (which has been a bit of a mantra in the media as of late). Bloggers, as a composite, have very little in common with each other, and this constant portrayal of some underlying binding thread is ridiculous. Having, or writing in, a blog is universally accessible. There is no great skill, sacrifice, or motivation in being a "blogger" (why blogger is being linked is a mystery to me - it's just the word in quotation marks. Sort of annoying). Furthermore, I've been seeing some readership numbers for some of the most popular blogs, and man are they a world less than you would think. Many of them were less than 1% of the daily reads that I would have expected given the perspective of blogs.