Google News has been my news page of choice since the day it was released (in beta then, and still today). I like it because they aggregate a number of different news source headlines and topics into one easy to follow simple browser user interface. In many ways, this is very similar to how headline-only blogs are being consumed via RSS.

Lately I’ve been noticing that Google is adding more blogs as news sources. This might seem unusual coming from a regular blogger, but I really hope that while they should certainly add some more blogs, I hope they don’t add too many blogs to their Google News index. This is the ” please don’t drown us” plea in the title.

I would like to see the editorial policy for adding new blogs be stringent enough so that there isn’t a flood of blogs being added. That type of torrential news pour will make the site less useful to me, not more. Tons of sources doesn’t necessarily improve the experience or usability (lesser is more, sometimes), especially if I don’t have the ability to customize the sources (which Google News doesn’t yet allow me to do). Yes, they allow me to customize news by keywords, but not yet sources. As they increase the overall number of sources they have to consider that individual users might like to customize the sources as well.

I can already get aggregated info via keywords on blogs via Technorai, Pubsub and Feedster but personally — and perhaps admittedly this is selfish — I’d like Google News to stick primarily to the regular news sources and a limited number of high-quality, regularly updated blogs.

Since I know quality is an extremely subjective endorsement, then there will probably never be complete agreement on what sources should be in and which sources should be out of Google News. I don’t want to get into specifically what sites should be in or out, I just want the relative number of sources to be kept smaller as a whole.

Google News quotes the current number as 4,500+ sources and I’d say no more than 5% of those should be news-oriented blogs. That leaves room for 250 high quality, regularly-updated news-oriented blogs. If suddenly they added 5,000 blog sources then overall the index, IMO, would suffer in overall news-oriented usefulness.

There aren’t 5,000 high quality, regularly updated news-oriented blogs out there. Yes, there are lots of great individual bloggers and while I may enjoy the heck out of reading their blogs, do I consider most of them to be a news-oriented blogs? Nope.

With that said, whatever blogs Google News does include, I’d like them to clearly identify and designate them as blog sources. This way readers can choose to filter in or out blogs for the headlines, if they want.

I realize there are some bloggers who feel very passionately that they should have their blogs treated as professional news sources and you know what I say to them: then change your site from being a blog and make it a full blown news site with RSS as well as hire staff: reporters, columnists, etc. Most bloggers aren’t running their blogs as a busines nor are they regularly reporting on news, local, national or worldwide.

I’ll give an example of the type of blog I’d like to see in Google News. We own the domain of the city where we live and we have a blog there currently. I’d love to see this community blog get more and more writers from people in the city from the local schools, post office, fire fighters, police, mayor, etc. This would be the type of grass roots localized journalism that I’d enjoy seeing Google News feature (which they could do by zip code so that people out of the area would not see this type of result/source, unless they specifically requested) — but not until after we get there with the content, if we ever get there. Meanwhile, I certainly don’t think the blog as we have it structured now (only a couple writers, and it’s scantily updated) to be worthy of being a Google News source.

Sorry fellow bloggers, but 99.999% of the blogs out there aren’t worthy of being classified as regularly updated news sources either. Sure, there is probably a time at just about every blog where it is a news source, but what I’m talking about is day-in, day-out news. Few blogs fit this type of definition.

Agree? Disagree?

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• Identifying Google News sources