Part of my daily routine is to sift through my news aggregator for new pieces about blogging. When I find one - usually I deliver a little regurgitorial followed by some analysis. But today, I’m going to do something a little bit different.
Although The Washington Post’s story about retired soldier Bill Roggio blogging from the front lines in Iraq is very interesting - what interested me most was the box in the sidebar:
After reading through the full list of 92 blogs that are currently discussing the article, I came to a few conclusions:
First of all, I know that Technorati generates the list of links automatically. But the Post is gutsy and thick-skinned to incorporate such a list into its site. Particularly when the blogger backlash on some articles -such as the Iraq blogger one - is so fierce. Many businesses would be loathe to include links from their site to the sites of their critics - but the Post enhances its own credibility by including those links.
Secondly, I’ll bet this “Who’s Blogging” thing has an added bonus for the Post. When bloggers notice that the Technorati-powered feature is driving traffic their way, they’ll be more likely to cite Post articles in future posts of their own that deal with news topics. It’s a permutation of the “you link to me, I’ll link to you” phenomenon.
And finally, spammers suck. As with everything else, they’ve found a way to hijack the system. A site for free vacations to Las Vegas (no link) was included among the sites “blogging” about the article. Lame.
I know I’m making a big deal over a few little lines of code the Post chose to imbed in its pages. But the decision to embed that code means that the Post recognizes the blogosphere and accepts our input - and not just selectively.
Here is the round up of the most blogged about Post articles.
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