I’m sorry, maybe my mad newz ski11z are lacking, but how is this newsworthy? A guy puts a video on YouTube inviting people to call him, yak and run up his cellphone minutes. The point? Who knows! The impact on society? None! The news value? Tremendous!

The thing that gets me about these stories is that they aren’t interesting, but because aging baby-boomer editors are too scared to admit they don’t understand blogging and the Internet, they jump at these non-stories to hide their online illiteracy. Nobody wants to be the one news outlet not to cover the story, so it spreads like crazy, and suddenly everyone is talking about this guy like he’s doing something important.

He’s not. In fact, what he’s doing isn’t even new. Someone else did the exact same thing last fall.

So why all the attention?