Web Clips: More than an annoyance, less than a newsreader

I don't get the new gmail webclips thing - what's the point?

If I want news, I'll hit the news site. If I want slashdot, I'll hit slashdot.

And I can't set it up (that I can tell) to use as a quickie feed reader. I read a handful of blogs, and I can't set it up such that it shows me the current headline for each. I mean, I don't really like feed readers anyway, I just trust my blogroll to tell me when sites update, and then I hit that site. I mean, part of the charm of reading blogs is seeing that person's site.

The way webclips is set up, it's like I'm having stuff that I would read anyway advertised to me. I don't need to have a four day old headline from fishfrog tossed up to me. I read it four days ago. But there's one other huge problem. It's gonna show me ads.

It's gonna show me *ADS*?! I've already got enough ads in my sidebar, thank you very much. I don't understand whom this feature is for.

I am not as in-the-know as some are, but I thought I remembered reading somewhere that there was a huge push in the late 90's/early aughties for having content delivered to your computer. That you would get the latest CNN headlines or whatever sent to you, and that this push turned out to be a huge failure because nobody wanted to get more shit thrown in their face. The charm of the net is that you can go find your own shit. Isn't webclips more shit flinging?