Personal Blogs on Google News

Personal blogs are showing up on Google News

[BReflection]

I am not trying to plug anyones blog first of all, but I feel this merits discussion. I read Google News religiously, several times a day. I find that if something torrential goes on I will find out about it and the rest of the stuff I usually see on TV is just squabbling. It is also nice to get some different points of view floating around in your head. Well, today I was quite surprised to see this headline on the front page of Google News:

North Korea announces nuclear weapons!

Slashdot has been on Google News for as long as I can remember, but this is from a personal blog.

I suppose this asks a few questions. Are all of the ~4500 news sources hand picked? Is this the only personal blog? Is there a list somewhere with all of the sources? Most importantly, at what point is a blog "news"?

It may not mean much, but according to Alexa more people visit Google News than visit Google Groups than visit the Google Directory. Even if it is only .1% of Google's traffic that is a lot of human beings reading this "news"!