Not blogspam. Circa is a pretty cool tool that tells a news story by pulling in all the sources talking about it, and then updates the story as new information comes in. Take a look at them; it's really useful.

Never heard of Circa, but I don't think it's allowed anyways. From the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

I see the point of this guideline, but will still argue that Circa provides more value to the readers here since it links out to multiple sources (also linked to SFgate: http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2013/03/04/george-mille...), therefore giving readers a more holistic view of the story.

Even if it's not technically blogspam, the best practice should still be to link to direct sources, no?

One link versus several? I like one link, personally.

So if you can aggregate more than one source, you're not blogspam anymore? :)

If you're adding quality on top of citing sources, then yeah, in my book they're not blogspam.