In the early days of theWeb, static HTML pages predom- inated; a handful of news-oriented Web sites of broad appeal updated their content once or twice a day. Users were by and large able to get all the news they needed by surfing to each site individually and pressing Reload. However, the Web today has experienced an explosion of micronews: highly focused chunks of content, appear- ing frequently and irregularly, scattered across scores of sites. The difference between a news site of 1994 and a weblog of 2004 is its flow: the sheer volume of timely information available from a modern Web site means that an interested user must return not.
