One of the many sad things is that newspaper revenues are declining because people go to the web for news, and a lot of primary story-digging is done by print reporters. However, the great news blogs can help a lot with stories that the Authorities are trying to bury. I've forgotten which government scandal this was, but a few weks ago the government dumped 3,000 pages of documentary evidence on a Friday night, confident that nobody could wade through it all to the meat of the scandal. Individual blog readers worked overnight on fifty-page chunks. The government was not happy with the results of this freelance parallel processing.

Then there was the proposal to stop funding NOAA, because everybody could get the weather forecast from the Weather Channel.

We have to work out new ways to live witht the new technologies. Andf it's damned hard.