I've been following (and rooting for) jaanix for a long time now -- pretty much since their debut -- and it's strange: I really really like their idea, and I really really like that they've put a ton of work into improving it. Yet, I have a really hard time sticking with it myself; I find myself gravitating instead towards Reddit, which frankly I have come to loathe. I don't understand it, and I wish I did.

| Why did Yahoo choose celeb news over any other topic? Because they found that they would get more news news in the celeb news category than any other.

That's an interesting angle. I have to chew on that for a while. I always just figured that it went that way for the same reason that all the cheap glittery celebrity gossip mags line the supermarket aisles: it's everyone's guilty pleasure. They sell more copies of "People" in a week than they'd sell of "Discover" in a month.

But, it could still come back to the news always being new, that people are drawn to junk like Britney's latest embarrassment because it's always new, even when it's really still the same old thing.

Or, maybe they're just barely literate gossip hounds that get some kind of psychological positive feedback from finding out that there are other people even more screwed up than they are. ...