Interesting. I hope they identify them somehow at the URL level so they can be easily distinguished from traditional news providers. An awful lot of search engines treat Topix content authoritatively since it comes from “official” news providers. If they change that then it has some ramifications.

I agree… Topix is going to have to do a good job of establishing what is and isn’t a blog headline

I wouldn’t want to hear that Bush was Assassinated by Osama bin Laden only to find out that it was a blog I was reading and not a legitimate news source!

Yes — we’re tagging the source type here separately. Currently, the UI is called out on our site with a background color, and we’ll separate this in partner feeds, as well.

This is one of the more interesting issues here — calling things out visially, and in the feeds is a straightforward first step — but we’re watching this closely.

Chris,

Awesome product. What you are doing will allow so many more people to understand blogs. You made the web a better place yesterday.

Michael:

Glad you like it! Catchy headline, BTW — Yours was the best out of a whole bunch today.

Thanks for checking out what we’re doing. (even if some of us are on the web 1.0 side of the table

-CST

Chris, the funny thing is that only you and I know what you are talking about in that last sentence…(ten points and a TechCrunch tshirt to anyone else who can figure it out). Thanks for bringing that up…and I apologize and retract that statement completely based on what you guys are doing now.

Vanity searching on anything said about oneself is the one feature completely covered by blog search in 2005.

Glad I didn’t talk any more about tagging that day, though