Am I news?

I'm not by nature the world's most humble person. That is pretty much evident by the simple fact that I have this blog, which is a vanity tool for self-promotion, I have no financial interest in it. I derive a certain satisfaction and sense of accomplishment from the fact that I get over 2,000 visitors every day, plus another 1,000 people reading my RSS feed. But this week I'm starting to feel slighly uncomfortable about the level of celebrity status I appear to have achieved. In the last 3 days the new MMO news site Massively published three different articles that can best be described as re-blogging my content: Linking to a post of mine, summarizing it's content, and asking their readers what they think of it. I wouldn't have thought I'd be *that* newsworthy. "Tobold writes something" shouldn't be a headline.

It is true that I'm trying to post articles with original ideas to mix with the otherwise predictable articles with comments on MMO news. "Bioware teams up with LucasArts to make new MMO", you try and come up with an original comment to that one, *everyone* has the same "the next Star Wars MMO is coming" idea here. Thus posts like the one on level-less MMOs are me trying to offer something different. But that doesn't make me unique. There is a good number of excellent MMO blogs with original ideas out there that I am reading (and linking to) regularly. And some are much better researched than mine, like Keen and Graev's blog to give just one example. So why should I be any more newsworthy than the other blogs? I'm having trouble getting my head around that.