More news not good news

I'm not sure which news story was more over-the-top this week: Michael Jackson's memorial or the announcement of Google's Chrome operating system.

Google announced the latter on its blog at 9:37 pm on Tuesday, July 7. Many online news outlets had their stories up within an hour or two of that announcement. Ars Technica actually scooped them all by about an hour with some nice, old-school reporting.

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By the time I got to work Wednesday morning and began browsing through my RSS feeds, I had my choice of 14 stories about Chrome. None of them substantially advanced the story beyond, "It's here! (Well, not yet. But it will be!)"

But within 24 hours, those same feeds were choked with 55 more stories about Chrome, most of them trying to explain What It All Means--what we used to call "second day stories," back when the news came out once a day.

Frankly, those 69 stories about Chrome OS were at least 65 more than I really needed. (Don't get me started on the number of my feeds that mentioned Michael Jackson this week--300 stories and counting.)

All the news, fit or not

The journalist in me loves the fact that there's so much competition in online news. But as a reader, the super-abundance is driving me a bit nuts.

I currently follow 40 or so technology news feeds. (I used to follow many more.) I do so because I know that, once in a while, a story will appear on one site and not on any of the others, and I don't want to miss that one story.

But getting your news online takes work. My algorithm for scanning RSS feeds is something like: Have I seen this story already? If yes, skip it and go to next. If I haven't seen it already, does it look like it's worth reading? If yes, read it. If not, skip it and go to next.

In the case of the Chrome announcement, I spent a lot of time that first morning saying, "Next," because none of those 14 initial news stories was substantially different from the others.

But by the afternoon, I had to slow down. Because that's when the reporters put on their pundits hats and started analyzing the announcement. Trouble was, there wasn't much to analyze.

Two stubborn facts made analysis difficult: Chrome won't be available for another year. And we know precious little about it beyond its due date and the fact that it's designed primarily for netbooks. Nobody really knows at this point what impact, if any, the Chrome OS will have on you, me, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or anyone else.