Omg, Yahoo! entertainment news.

I wrote a post in this weblog a while back about a CNN news headline that appeared at the top of my email inbox, unprovoked, just daring me to click on it. The headline read "How to not get robbed while traveling", if I'm not mistaken. My post was essentially dedicated to just making fun of the headline and the wide range of possibilities a story with that headline has. I don't remember being annoyed by that headline appearing unsolicited in my personal email inbox, just amused. But this has gone far enough. I signed into my email this morning, and was greeted with this:

Yahoo! News: Entertainment News - Elizabeth Hurley's Boyfriend Shane Warne: I'm in Love (omg!) - 1 hour ago

Wow, Yahoo!. (That punctuation is correct because they have an exclamation point as part of their name, because otherwise no one would be excited about Yahoo! anymore. It is so 1997.) Honestly, who gives a القرف. Seriously. You have a social responsibility to not make people read garbage like that. It's ridiculous. That is not news. News is information that is factual (which criterion you met with this headline [in that he said, "I'm in love." We've no way of knowing whether he really is]) and important to the utility of your audience (which criterion you did not meet: I am a [forced] member of your audience, and I could not care less about how this man feels).

I guess it's society's fault for giving people like Elizabeth Hurley (she's a tennis player, or something, right?) so much pomp and attention. Yahoo! is just fulfilling their part in the celebrity news supply and demand model. A sad, bored group of people live for updates like this, and are so desperate to feel like these shiny people who look good in just their skivvies are their personal friends that they will eat up every crumb of every inane story they can find about them. Then they will eat up the toaster strudels that the flashing banner ad that accompanied the story told them to buy. It isn't Yahoo!'s fault. It's ours. Man, don't we feel like idiots. We don't? Well, we should.

They are NOT your friends! They don't even know you!