Online Prodigies

In Michigan, there is is a group that created a personalized website for Michiganites (Michiganians, Michiganers?) who want to read about environmental stories. They basically find relevant stories and link to them on their website, allowing people to tag certain topics they are looking for. So, a group could create a profile, tagging their interests, and this website would know to send them stories relevant to these tags.
After they find the link to a good story, this website "Michigan's Echo" also provides a short summary of each article.
To me, this is great for readers and news-lovers in general. This means that Google could potentially select out news stories for you based on your interests and choices. I'm sure the technology is out there, but the need is probably questionable. It may be a good idea to get people reading news first.
For this specific website, subscribers can select their topics, but also regions. So a Western Michigan story involving bikes and fish would be tagged to show the readers just that.
The lucky thing is that this is located on a very local database. Meaning that all the stories are about Michigan environmentalism, therefore all the readers would be from Michigan or in Michigan, interested in environmental stories.
On a larger scale, like the Google News of the world, this would be far more difficult. The subscribers would be more spread out and the interests and tags would be much harder to narrow down. Nonetheless, I still think it's a good idea and by George I'll make it happen.

The other story on this website (E-Media Tidbits) is about the danger (or power) of blogging. The story is about a guy who made fun of a colleague of his on his weblog.
It just so happens that this colleague worked for a major news outlet at the time, and made a small (but important) mistake with numbers regarding Chinese Internet users. Rogers, the blogger, made fun of him on his blog. Next thing he knew, Google was using his blog as the first result when someone searched for the news man. As hard as the news organization tried to make their website first, it wouldn't work (due to the crazy and seemingly random system of the Google algorithm).
Because of this, the first entry was not so much a pleasant image of the news man, and the blogger was begged to take down the post. According to Rogers, it is never the policy of any blogger to take down a post unless ordered to do so by a court. However, he chose to take it down.
This is a huge topic lately because of the unknown power of blogs and bloggers. Not only are members of media organizations blogging, but so are Joe Shmos from Wisconsin. Not saying that Joe is not an expert on foreign policy, but their blogs may not be as reliable as, let's say, an actual expert's website.
The problem is that very little distinguishes their website from another site of actual credibility. It's up to those who can reason it out to figure out which sites are better. And let me tell you Americans are the geniuses to do it.

Smaller and less thought-provoking article was about the use of timelines to aid information and articles. It basically said that to use them is to do so at your own risk. It's only worthwhile if you use it to tell more than just dates and events. For example, the one they use is about war and when and where attacks occurred. It is interesting, however, that one can look at these types of stories online now and do interactive things with them like with this one.

Side note: chapter 4 in the book is about how to use quotes and how not to plagiarize. For a brief summary of this chapter, I'll provide my favorite part: Deleting obscenities. I don't want to. I think they make the quote better. The end.