Many traditional newspaper readers who don’t know anything about blogs will be exposed to them, and bloggers who comment on breaking news stories can now get more exposure as a result of the joint venture between Technorati and the Associated Press.
An agreement by both companies will provide up-to-the-minute links that help readers navigate between AP news coverage and recent blogs about stories on AP’s Hosted Custom News service for websites.
When readers visit one of more than 400 AP member websites for newspapers that uses AP Hosted Custom News, they will see a module featuring the “Top Five Most Blogged About” AP articles. This module is dynamically powered by Technorati and within it, the reader will see links to a Technorati page that guides them to recent blog posts about that specific AP article.
Also, when readers click on an AP article, Technorati will deliver “Who’s Blogging About That Article,” a listing of blog names with the date and time recent posts were made. The new functionality will be available to the more than 440 AP member websites in the United States that take AP’s Hosted Custom News.
It’s great news for the blogging community and a terrific service for newspaper readers.
This is great! It both makes a distinction between bloggers and trained reporters (a useful distinction for a number of reasons, positive and negative on both sides–they are different animals)–and makes at least some portion of the blogosphere accessible to non-blog-oriented readers.
I suspect we’ll see more of this sort of integration.
PS: A recent comment I made on my business ethics blog http://www.principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/ (about the Enron verdict) got cited in Slate.com–and I got a nice surge of traffic. And ironically, that equaled the press coverage I got on a big press release drop announcing that I was an expert available to comment on the verdict, which was distributed the day before they were found guilty. Publicity Hounds who are not yet blogging should really ask themselves why they’re resisting.