News

I am a junkie.

And like all good junkies, I keep going back to my poisons. I binge on them. And then manage to stay clean for some time, before going back again.

I have a serious addiction for, in no particular and often overlapping order: Chocolate, sunshine, stories, love, sleep, my daughter, dance, games, endorphines, movies, excitement, coke, www, logic, and my bike. And news. I have given a few of them up, hopefully for good. Like coke. But most of the others will seduce me to a point where I lose my control. Again and again and again.

I am currently on a news binge. Have been almost all this week. This has caused a horrible backlash in my productivity. And that at a time when I actually need to be getting some stuff done. Ah well.

After giving up, early on, on the traditional media, i.e. radio/tv/newspapers, as my main fix, mainly because of lack of depth, their bias, and how slooow they can be, I have mostly relied on the Web during my news-episodes. The recent explosive proliferation of syndication, e.g. RSS has given my aggregator a permanent home in the corner of my screen, just to give me those few extra minutes while I dig deeper for the rest of the stories on the Web.

My taste in web sources changes pretty fast, and I have all but given up on traditional news pages, since they are usually just a bi-product of clunky other-media outlets, e.g. cnn.com. I still like bbc though, mainly because they seem to stay fresh in a quirky sort of way.

My weapon of choice, though, is news.google.com, especially the related sections, the international versions (those that I understand, of course). They rule, and if they expand their new customization feature, I will be hooked for good.

What I would really like though, would be to see wikinews.org flourish, or at least become as mezmerising as some of the other grand wiki projects, wikipedia of course frontmost, has become.

The power of one is so encouraging. You actually can make a difference.

Sort of.