why would anyone spend all that time cutting and pasting?

after writing the below post, after scouring news sites for additional information about yesterday's attack in taraz and finding that new updates didn't seem to be forthcoming, i looked to see if other blogs wrote anything about the attacks. my usual blogs about central asia had not written about the attack yet (and still haven't as of this writing), so i searched for "taraz" on google blogsearch to see if i could turn up something on a site i wasn't already familiar with. (it's always possible that some blogger out there, who doesn't necessarily write one of the usual central asian-focused blogs, has some random connection with the city. you know, someone like me). i found a lot of posts about the attack, but almost all of them were simple cut-and-paste jobs of the article from reuters, the BBC, or AFP about the attack that i had already seen. (e.g.--not to pick on that particular site. there seemed to be dozens that did basically the same thing)

what is the point of running a blog like that? the reuters/BBC/AFP articles are already online. if you want to draw attention to them, a simple links would suffice. why would anyone bother to run a blog that is nothing more than copies of articles that anyone could find more easily elsewhere? i know, i know, what's the point of any blog? (i certainly would never say my site has any real purpose) but unless there is something new, some value added to the existing news story, a blog seems even more pointless than the usual level of pointlessness there is with every blog. i'm just surprised by just how many bloggers there seem to be out there who just blockquote entire articles. i had no idea it was that common.