Here’s some big news, the 440 news outlets around the country that use the AP’s news module will now include a list of the most blogged about news items of the day on their sites and display inbound links to each individual article as discovered by Technorati. I wrote about it over on Social Software – and it will be interesting to see what other people think. I think it’s great – especially for local-issue bloggers. The barrier between traditional and new media is being broken down more every day.
Here’s some free advice: nonprofit organizations wanting to do issue-based outreach with their blogs would be well served to subscribe to the feeds of organizations like the AP, either for search terms or through a filter. For high-priority items, if you’ve got a fast blogger on your team, set up an RSS to IM/SMS alert system for selected filtered feeds. That way your blog will be amongst the first to cover AP stories of interest. That’s how I wrote about the Technorati/AP partnership announcement before any other blogs did.
Interesting note: when this type of alert system sets me to write a particular post and I’m looking to cover the news first, I ping the key ping servers manually with Pingoat to come and index my new post instead of relying on automated pinging systems. Google Blogsearch has found my post about this partnership in its search results, but despite pinging Technorati specifically, Technorati has yet to discover the post I wrote linking to its own blog. Hmmm…
Another note, this on Memeorandum: the Technorati blog post I covered is on the top of the page, this blog – which does not link to the Technorati post but to the Social Software post that does – is second in the conversation, and the Social Software post I made is third. Interesting. A number of conclusions could be drawn from that.