AP to Link Blogs Linking Stories
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James Joyner | Thursday, May 25, 2006 |
AP gets it. They will soon join WaPo and the NYT and link back to blogs linking their stories.
The Associated Press announced two agreements Tuesday one that will tie its news stories to the rapidly growing world of blogs and another that will help guide readers to newspaper Web sites. Under the first, Technorati Inc., the leading search engine for blog postings, will provide links to blogs that cite AP stories. The AP also will assist search engine Topix.net, controlled by three major newspaper companies, in sending readers directly to the sites of newspapers when stories in the AP report are based primarily on material from those members.
The deals highlight efforts by AP, a not-for-profit cooperative owned by U.S. news organizations, to help member newspapers and broadcasters in a world where many people get their news from the free-wheeling and chaotic Web. Technorati will search blogs for postings that include links to AP stories. Links to those postings will be available along with the original AP stories on 440 member Web sites served by AP Hosted News, a service that uses AP servers to display AP content on member sites. There also will be a box featuring the “Top Five Most Blogged About” AP stories.
This is just smart business. It will add to the incentive for blogs to link their stories and for readers to pay attention to where stories are coming from and who’s talking about them.
What would be even more helpful is if they’d keep static versions of stories in an archive. Currently, AP constantly updates stories, changing and deleting things that were in previous versions; plus, the stories disappear altogether at some point. One of the reasons I created OTB News was to have a way to link to a given version of an AP story and have it be there permanently.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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