Topix.net adds blogs - is it news?

Today Rich Skrenta, CEO of topix.net, announced they'd added 15,000 of the top weblogs to the Topix.net search engine. These blog posts are now being categorized into Topix's 30,000 local feeds and 300,000 subject feeds. Topix is one of the smartest Internet news services around and so it's great to see them finally blow away the artificial boundaries between 'professional' media and 'amateur'.

Skrenta addresses the key question straight up in his post: Are blog posts news? I think he adequately answered his own question a sentence or two later: "What we're releasing today is our first step in connecting our readers to 15,000 more voices talking about the topics they care about."

Blogs are about passion and topic knowledge. If you know and love a topic, then that will shine through in your blog. Over the past few years, the traditional journalistic principle of objectivity has slowly but surely been eroding away. I don't want to bring up politics, but we've all seen and recognized the biased news reporting of the war in Iraq. In fact, mainstream news media is often just as subjective as blogs. The only difference is that blogs not only admit their subjectivity, but embrace it.

Skrenta also points out that blogs add different types of voices to their service. In the Topix service there are many more tech blogs than tech mainstream journalism, for example. And there are many more sports mainstream sources in Topix than sports blogs. So it evens out the Topix coverage, as well as enhancing it.

15,000 blogs is just the start too. Topix hopes to add up to 1 million! Personally I think it's great news! But then I'm biased ;-) I'm interested in your view, ZDNet readers...