[jamesjyu]

It's pretty obvious here that this article is poking fun at all the sensationalism:

Perhaps most importantly, what will happen if the kids move onto harder stuff like Steve Reich, Philip Glass or even Janet Cardiff’s installation, “The Killing Machine“?

[anigbrowl]

I got that; my objection is to giving a 'silly season' story undeserved further momentum, implicitly endorsing its novelty. Of course, publishers always need some standby material to fill the 'news hole' between the ads - 'slow news day? No scandals? oh well...run a teen panic story then.'

This over-reliance on filler material is one of the things I dislike about old media. Since newspapers and broadcast news are anchored in time, recycled and anniversary stories have some utility in that they'll be new to enough of the audience to justify occasional repetition. But on the internet where information is mostly persistent, it's high time to abandon this capsule approach and move towards extending and updating a single story - a bit more along the lines of Wikipedia, but preferably without the opaque editing fiefdoms.

Part of my grumpiness stems from ongoing annoyance at content farming and a degrading signal:noise ratio. The internet feels constipated to me now in a way that seems to happen about every 6 years or so.* So I've got a spiffy new beta interface for Google News - yay; but their deployment of Caffeine means that my news feed contains more and more populist rubbish (like this i-dosers story).

Oh, and get off my lawn :-)

* the good part of that is the opportunities for disruption. Past information logjams were broken up by the arrival of HTML/Mosaic; Google search; and client-side web apps.

[rsingel]

Wow. Next time, I'll make sure to write an encyclopedia article rather than a tongue-in-cheek takedown, now that I know the latter isn't allowed on the internet.

By the way, have you ever read the Threat Level blog where this was published? It's definitely a content farm, but we grow some damn fine kumquats.

[anigbrowl]

I read Threat Level frequently, and generally like it. Other than the first sentence, my post above is not about you: it's about old media and my perception of internet trends in general. One day you too will share my blighted, joyless perspective.