I'm one of those people who think it doesn't matter very much whether journalists work for someone else, or are self employed. And it doesn't matter whether their stuff appears in print, on the web, or both.

In other words, in the "are bloggers journalists?" debate, I say yes.

So as one hack to another hack, I look at Paul Staines' decision to out one of his sources - apparently as revenge for the source giving him a story that turned out to be wrong - and say: "What the hell?"

(This is the polite version of this post).

I was trying to explain how the "Birmingham and West Midlands Politics News" gadget works to Andy Mabbett on Twitter, and did such a poor job of it I thought I'd try again here.

The gadget was created using Sproutbuilder. It takes an RSS feed of political news from the Birmingham Post and Birmingham Mail, and displays it as you can see. Clicking on a headline will take you to the web page where the story originally appeared.

You can add it to pretty much any website or blog, or Facebook/Myspace/etc page, for free, by clicking the "share" button and following the instructions.

The RSS feed it uses is one I created in Yahoo Pipes. This amalgamates four different RSS feeds from the Birmingham Post and Birmingham Mail, namely: every news story in the Post's politics section, my Birmingham Post blog, my Birmingham Mail column and most of my Birmingham Post columns.

There is, as you can tell, an element of self-promotion involved.

But the key point - and this is where I am afraid I made little sense when I spoke to Andy - is that anyone can make one of these. So if you want a gadget on your site which has sports news from the Birmingham Mail and the Express and Star, for example, you can just go ahead and make one.

All you need to do is sign up at Sproutbuilder. And if you can find the right RSS feeds, or know how to filter stuff in Yahoo Pipes, it's easy enough to make a specialised widget - for example, which only included football stories, or which pulled in any story from a dozen different websites which mentioned Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Sproutbuilder switched fairly recently from being free to charging. But it does offer basic free accounts, allowing you to make three gadgets with up to 10gb a month of bandwidth - probably enough for most needs?

So if anyone wants to add my gadget to their website, just go ahead. But if it's not what you want, you could make one yourself easily, and they are fun to do.

Another local news-site which caught my eye is theYamYam.com, a bit of an odd beast.

It offers précis of stories from other sources - mostly traditional media, with the odd blog thrown in - and links to the original article. As far as I can tell, there is no original content on the site itself.

Update: I've noticed the site does have the odd original story. This may be a new development. But they make up a miniscule proprtion of the stories listed on the site.

Basically, someone has done some work making a very nice-looking site which takes news from elsewhere, and added some Google ads in what I guess is an attempt to make a little cash, or at least pay their hosting fees.

Some of the stories come from BPM Media, the company which employs me.

As the YamYam offers only a couple of sentences from the original story and a link (without a nofollow tag), I guess it's a bit of free advertising for businesses like mine.

Of course, any website which offers RSS feeds, such as BPM's Birmingham Post, Birmingham Mail and Sunday Mercury sites, is inviting others to re-use the content.

Having said that, the YamYam does grab a little bit more than the rather miserly headline + one sentence we offer on RSS.

What do I think of it? I think it's a good idea, and mainstream media organisations shouldn't be afraid of aggregating content - providing links to stories by competitors - either.

The BBC does it. One of my favourite sites, Politics Home, does it. I kind of do it on this blog, in the small "national news" block in the right hand column.

As well as offering our own original reports, there's no reason a website like The Birmingham Post couldn't become a one-stop-shop with summaries of and links to news from the Express and Star, blogs and semi-professional sites such as The Stirrer.

It would be a service to readers, it would drive traffic to the site (just as I check out Politics Home on a regular basis), and we could stick some Google ads around the links as well.

I've decided to play around with methods of visualising data. To get me started, here's an image which shows what I've been talking about on this blog lately, created using Wordle.