Reading through my favoured RSS news feeds this morning I came across this article on the amorality of the web. Skipping past the new age nonsense - all waffle about minds transcending our embodied form and developing a collective consciousness online - the author attacks Wikipedia and blogs, bringing up the age-old (i.e. pre-internet) concern of "amateurs vs. professionals". Looking at the RSS feeds I read I'd have to agree with him, because I obviously prefer reading the work of professional writers over amateur blogs any day of the week.

My favourite news sources include The Guardian, UK Watch, FOX News (for the other side, and a laugh) and Newsforge. I also subscribe to the New Statesman by snail mail. The only blogs I ever read are Jesus' General (because it's hilarious) and The Dark Age Blog (because he discusses issues that you don't see anywhere else). I suppose you could also include those aggregated on Planet KDE and Planet GNOME, which I use to keep up to date with the techie communities. I've read a few of the better-known blogs for a while, but they just don't give me the insider-analysis or the big-picture stories that I get from the New Statesman or UK Watch.

When it comes to looking up information, my first port of call is always Wikipedia, I admit. But if I'm doing any real work, I'll always follow it by checking the unparallelled Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the journals archived on JSTOR and my university library.

Of course a benefit of Wikipedia and blogs is that they enable you to create and interpret, which I think is important. It can improve your ability to think issues through, to respond to criticism and to think more critically, to articulate your thoughts clearly. Online content inevitably documents techie subjects better than offline content, so I'll always look to the web for information on technical subjects. Wikinews and Wikipedia also often cover current affairs more broadly than traditional media outlets since they are able to quickly aggregate more reports. The Wikipedia page on the 7th July bombings in London was more comprehensive as events unfolded than any other, but only really by virtue of grabbing information coming from media "dinosaurs" like the BBC.

So it makes me wonder: who actually reads blogs as their primary news source, or even as a main news source? Who seriously uses Wikipedia for anything more than quick reference, to get the gist of what something is about?

edit: I have to clarify, who reads blogs for news, not for crazy rambles like this or for keeping up to date with a community. Also, I'm fully aware that the corporate media and professional sources are as full of bias as blogs and Wikipedia, I just don't think that the openness of the latter makes them any less biased. Where do they get their primary information from if not from the mainstream media anyway, plus their own personal spin? Wikipedia is just a reflection of a mainstream, western, technically literate and relatively wealthy socio-economic group.