Add online video to the places where the battle over health care is playing out. The White House posted an online response to a video that’s been viewed hundreds of thousands of times since it was linked from the Drudge Report. The Drudge Report linked to a YouTube video posted by Naked Emperor News. Titled “Shock Uncovered: Obama in His Own Words Saying His Health Care Plan Will Eliminate Private Insurance,” it includes clips of comments President Barack Obama has made, such as “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care plan.”

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When Google released its Flu Trends service earlier this week, the Drudge Report flashed a headline that read: “SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS.”

Google sought to avoid this kind of reaction by talking about how Google Flu Trends protects the privacy of its users. The service relies “on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week,” Google said.

Still, the worries persist. On Wednesday, two advocacy groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Patient Privacy Rights, sent a letter to Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, raising privacy concerns: “The question is how to ensure that Google Flu Trends and similar techniques will only produce aggregate data and will not open the door to user-specific investigations, which could be compelled, even over Google’s objection, by court order or Presidential authority.”

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Early every morning, I open my Web browser and load up a half-dozen “aggregator” sites: Techmeme, Memeorandum, Real Clear Politics, Google News, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post. This is my first sortie into the day’s news, the way I orient myself to what’s going on in the world now that I no longer subscribe to a print newspaper. After picking clean the smorgasbord of links, I dip into a second set of sites, these pulling in quirkier tales from around the Web: Digg, BuzzFeed, Fark, Hacker News, Boing Boing, and Kottke as well as my personalized Web aggregators at Friendfeed and Google Reader. During the course of the day, I repeat this process often; in my manic hunt for the freshest stuff on the Web, I reload some of these sites 10 or 20 times each.

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This week I’ve been covering what appears to be an assault by the Associated Press on the principle of fair use. While this particular flap (which involves posts to a community site called the Drudge Retort) concerns bloggers and site users, many say it could end up having a chilling effect on journalism and free speech.

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I moved to New York City a mere six months ago, expecting an anonymous existence while I struggled to make new friends. Things moved quickly, starting with my very first night out. “I know you,” said some scruffy guy who accosted me at the Magician, that Lower East Side bar overfrequented by bloggers. “You’re the guy who Garrison Keillor tried to sue.”

That happens to be true. A few years back I launched a T-shirt line with ironic slogans. One parodic shirt in particular apparently raised the ire of the Lake Wobegon creator: “Prairie Ho Companion.” It seemed funny to me, but a micro-scandal ensued when the cease-and-desist for trademark infringement arrived from Keillor’s lawyer. It created a silly blip on the Internet that day, followed by a couple of afternoons of online mayhem, as the story was picked up by Drudge, then Sullivan, then Kos, then Huffington. And then the mainstream media started to call.

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