I read an interesting point of view on net about news and google news in particular. It said google news fetches news from other sources, and displays them based on whatever algorithm to rank stories. But however good the fetch and search algorithms may be, the ultimate quality of google news still relies on the original content writers themselves. If the journalistic quality of the original news content goes down, can the quality of google news remain the same ?

This is a very relevant point. In terms of content, the web has seen several trends -- one of the first trends was having online presence and news content, the recent one is of laymen using web to express opinions and doing social web (through blogging, podcasts, sharing favourite bookmarks, and so on). In terms of sheer attention, the second trend seems to be getting the most attention lately.

However, the point remains that content is important, and the old saying that "content is king", is not going away anytime soon. There may be millions of blogs, but the widely read ones will be few ones, primarily because their readers respect the blog authors as being opinion leaders and experts in their areas. Similarly, though several people may follow google news, the discerning readers will still have their favourite online news sources, and may spend their online time on various web sites based on content quality.