That's very true. If it's a new product from a manufacturer and you see it first you can break it that way, or if the product hasn't done the rounds in your blog niche yet you can be the first to write about it there. It is very difficult being the first so you do need to look in more unusual places or have a different and unique twist when writing about things.
I always tend to twist the feed info I get into my own particular words that most of my readers can understand. Basically I wade through all the nonsense and enhance with my own.
Boing Boing makes money because of their humongous traffic .. if you have traffic, you have dozens of ways to make money. And they aren't the number one blog in Technorati and haven't been for a while. Engadget is the number one blog now.
SFOD is right, and about 90% of content on the web is just copied from somewhere else. You can't be the one to break every news story in your niche, but just because someone else broke it doesn't mean you should ignore it. Personally, I try to post ~25% original content (half of which flops), ~25% that is a spin on other content, and ~50% summaries from other sites. This allows me to post 1-4 short posts per day, and typically keep people entertained. So far it has worked for me. Anita
Yes we are out there, but many places hire writers directly... trust me they are not doing it for free.
I think it helps to learn by watching what potentially great blogs are doing. Labnol for example didn't get to the top straight away. ITs author claims to have been blogging regularly for a year before he found decent success. So if you want to learn how he did it you need to find a blog thats on the brink of widespread popularity. IMO http://www.freakitude.com is one such blog.