The political blog DailyKos has decided that Google News is rendered useless by all the blogs that appear. Thinks that it should be limited to "legitimate" news sources. Here's a link to the opinion, since I have trouble finding it on Kos. http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20061017DailyKosSpurnsGoogleNews.html

I disagree. I like reading what bloggers come up with. I posted my opinions on my own blog, http://richardbrandt.blogs.com/richard_brandt_on_google/

What do you think?

Losers ranting about meaningless stuff with no factual evidence. Yes

Blogs like this. No

Our blog (zorgloob.com) is in the French Google News, so not it's not a good idea to "eliminate blogs". But to do a better "filter" when they add sources should be a good idea ;)

But I'm not sure i want my news filtered. Who decides what's good and what's not? Personally, I'd filter out anything from Fox News. I had a startup once in which I tried to do a daily news summary of articles of interest to techies. I thought only a reporter with the patience to read every news article could do it. But Google News does a better job.

Like Sohil said, because blogs can potentially be a form of news publication, they shouldnt be all filtered out.

When this blog was still included in Google News, I had a flag which could trigger a post to be included or not included in News. This way, I could easily exclude e.g. parodies, or quick links/ quotes posts.

If Google News does not index blogs one day, it will seriously miss out on many articles in which news originally break... for stories that erupt in blogs, they will then only transport second-hand chatter. Too bad for their tool.

Google includes "Search blogs" feature at the bottom of the news search...
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/6015/blogsex9.jpg

pokemo , but that redirects to http://blogsearch.google.com
so it's basically splitting both things..

Looks like Google doesn't quite appreciate that there is essentially no difference between an old media 'news paper' source and a blog that's been around long enough to gain similar credibility.

I suppose they are taking the approach that the structure of traditional media companies (reports, sub editors, editors, ...) means that there's less chance of garbage / rants / skewed opinion pieces being produced.

Of course, half the stuff on Google News are skewed opinion pieces anyway – they're just written by people that are paid by CNN rather than out of pure interest. My vote? Write an algorithm that calculates *any* sources credibility rating to decide who appears, and give users the option of who not to include.

Will Google news index the article's written at the "official" office of Reuter in Second Life ? Its digital media in digital space written by a human being – and it's still deemed to be also Main stream media (MSM) too.

Philipp nails it well ..."If Google News does not index blogs one day, it will seriously miss out on many articles in which news originally break"

WHY is Google not Indexing Blogs in their news section ? What is value behind that decision ?

/PD,

There was some discussion here when this site was taken out of the News listings.

I just did a quick search and did not find the thread.

The basic point was Google wants to use sites that have a editorial review policy with the idea that it helps provide better checks and balances.

TonyB

Tony, you might be referring to this one:
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/69169.html

Whatever Google said in regards to having an editor, basically, is nonsense – 'cause Google Blogoscoped didn't have any more or less of an editor than it did when they were convinced GB was OK to be included in 2005. If they'd told me "article quality is decreasing" or "not enough scoops" or "not enough guest articles", well, all of that would've made at least
*theoretically* sense... as it's a matter of opinion whether or not it's true.

===>> "editorial review policy with the idea that it helps provide better checks and balances."

Bad decesion.. better checks and balanaces means in simple words.. better lies to the publix!!

The thing is, Google does NOT have a blanket policy to filter blogs. It's Kos that thinks they should.

If Google were to include blogoscoped in its news, people (including me!) would have found out about searchmash sooner.

Oh Well, Blogoscoped was in NEWS , but for some reason they pulled it!!

Philipp points out to the thread above.

Maybe they should include two services, a "news strict" and a "news wide" so the user can decide for himself.

As for the wording, maybe they should call it "traditional news sources" and "all news sources." Admittedly, a blog is not a traditional news source (because blogs haven't been around for that long), but it *can* still be a news source in the strictest sense. Most blogs aren't, but I believe the format holds the potential for being a real news source. There are some differences, of course... even news bloggers won't necessarily spend weeks to gain information on a given story, interviewing all kinds of related sources, going out to bug people! Then again, a traditional news source also won't as much act like a web detective like blog communities often do, spying around source code and such :)