The Next Blog is not random

Most blogs on Blogspot display a "Next Blog" link on the top of the page. I have often browsed blogs using the "Next Blog" link. Successive clicks on Next Blog would throw up random blogs from across the world. It seems that blogspot has modified this feature and put some intelligence behind which blog to show next. Today, every click on "Next Blog" brought up another blog from India. And most of the blogs that came up where quite interesting. For instance, one the blogs was from a journalist reporting from Manipur.

I keep myself current on happenings in India - especially about political events. So I was surprised how little I knew about happenings in Manipur! Like, in Dec-09, it was reported that all schools in the state have been shut for more than four months! That's shocking - and news like these are hardly reported in our media.

Customizing Google News

I am a great fan of Google. Google comes up with great products. However, in some instances they seem to be refusing adding simple features that people really need.

I use Google News to read news from different sources. Google news is a decent news aggregator. However there is one feature that readers across the world are craving for. The feature is to exclude news from a specific news sources in search results. If you google something like "google news exclude source", you'll find this issue being discussed in hundreds of forums. There is even a place where you can recommend this feature to google. I am sure hundreds of thousands of people would have recommended this feature. And it's a feature easy to implement. I don't know what's keeping Google from implementing it.

There are roundabout ways to achieve it. Someone suggested making changes to some Windows OS hidden files to block content from specific websites. Other simpler suggestions are like creating custom section with search string containing '-, for e.g. '-indiatimes.com'. I am trying that out. Let me see how effective it is. But it is really annoying that Google doesn't provide a easy way of doing it. For instance, why doesn't it allow customizing standard sections to filter out news from bogus sources, such as Times of India. Seeing news from from Times of India on my Google News page makes me sick.

Some interesting news

Here are links to some interesting news articles I came across in last few weeks:

First one is about the extent of corruption in Indian media. Almost all the news printed before elections are published by bribing journalists.

As yet, only The Hindu has written about rampant corruption that exists in Indian media. Hindu followed it up with an editorial titled Journalism for sale. Of the political parties, only the CPI(M) has openly spoken about the corruption in the media.

Second one is from The Times of India: RSS service projects multiply ten fold. Number of RSS run social development projects now number 1,57,776; up from 15,063 ten years ago.

Finally, today is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We can only imagine what that moment it would have been for Germans.

One more blog

I have created one more blog: one-news-of-the-day.blogspot.com

Both, "the-news-of-the-day.blogspot.com" and "a-news-of-the-day.blogspot.com" were taken. Hence one-news-of-the-day.blogspot.com.

The idea is to post links to interesting (not necessarily the most important) news that I come across.

A few weeks back I had created impartial-observer.blogspot.com.