Tag Archives: blog search

News sites beware: Google News readers can block all blogs

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Google News has made updates to allow users to further personalise the type of news they read.

Readers can now omit sites, choose to read more news from a selected site, increase or decrease the amount of blogs that appear or batch exclude all blogs from their Google News home page at one fell swoop.

Both blogs and news sites need to check how they are categorised by Google News. Just because you do not describe your site as a blog, doesn’t mean that Google News hasn’t listed you as one.

It is not clear how news sites can have their blog status removed but this form will allow your to flag it up with Google News

Hat tip: Search Engine Land

Global Voices Online: The unmasking of NightJack as told by the UK blogs

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I will now be cross-posting, and/or contributing occasional posts to Global Voices, the US-based founded but global community of more than 200 bloggers ‘who work together to bring you translations and reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.’ Sponsors of the project can be found at this link.

My first post for the site looks at the implications of the NightJack case (which I’ve previously rounded up here) with links to some of the best UK blog posts on the subject.

“A victory for freedom of expression (The Times’)… or a severe restriction for freedom of expression (anonymous bloggers)? Popular opinion is divided, though a blog search would indicate that blogger opinion veers towards the latter.”

Full post at this link…

NY Times exec ed Bill Keller sparks online comment with Darfur remark

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An extract from comments made by New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, at the opening of the Stanford Daily’s new building this week, has sparked a flurry of comment under the original Politico.com post, which was picked up by both the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post.

Michael Calderone’s post uses quotes reported by Politico’s Tim Grieve, which include:

“Keller predicted that the Times will be ‘left standing after the deluge.'”

“Commenting on the keep-the-Times alive movement, Keller said: “Saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.””

The comments below the article particularly pick up on the latter remark, many readers angered by what they perceive as Keller’s likening of the New York Times situation with that of the crisis in Darfur. “Talk about delusions. As important as Dafur!” writes ‘CLJ124’.

The link to the article on the front page of the Politico site, meanwhile, makes reference to the fact that Keller ‘joked’.

politico

Commenter ‘Michael Green’ writes: “Some of the comments about this piece miss a point or two. One is that Mr. Keller might have been ironic in referring to saving The Times as the equivalent to saving Darfur.”

Another, ‘Stacy Harris’, writes that it “is likely a poor choice of words that, upon reflection, Keller will regret.” An anonymous commenter, writes that it was a ‘parody’: “Regarding Darfur, Keller said that, considering all of the people who have offered to donate money to keep the Times alive, it appears that at least some people equate saving the Times with saving Darfur.”

Keller is also reported by Politico to have said “If you’re inclined to trust Google as your source for news – Google yourself.”

If he does that today he will find that a Google blog search on “bill keller” now returns: http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/blogsearch?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&hs=vih&q=bill%20keller&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wb and this is the result of a Google News search: http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=%22bill%20keller%22&sa=N&tab=bn.

Update: Bill Keller has emailed Politico, in response to the comments on the Politico post. Of his remarks he said:

“I think it’s pretty obviously a reflection of my mild astonishment at the earnest fervor with which some people have suddenly embraced the cause of saving newspapers.

“That’s matched only by my mild astonishment at the silly literal-mindedness with which some people read my occasional public comments.”

A fuller context to his comment is given in a new Politico blog post, at this link.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Here come the Web 2.0 docusoaps

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Swedes are getting so hooked on social media that for many web-crazy young things reality-TV has all but moved online.

Last night Twingly, the Swedish web company that supplies a blog trackback functionality to newspapers world-wide and last week launched its international spam free blog search engine Twingly.com, aired the first programme of its new reality-series on YouTube: The Summer of Code.

YouTube reality-show
“We have recruited four ambitious interns and given them six weeks to develop a visual search engine for blogs; Twingly Blogoscope,” said Martin Källström, CEO of Twingly.

“Everyone can follow what happens in the project via daily episodes on YouTube.”

The episodes will be uploaded Monday to Friday at 6 PM GMT (10 AM in San Francisco, 19:00 in Stockholm) and the first programme aired last night.

“Openness in this project is a way to show the daily life in the office,” said Källström.

“Generally people are not familiar with the stimulating working atmosphere in a start-up. Hopefully Twingly Summer of Code will inspire more people to join Twingly or other start-ups.”

Media increasingly about conversation
Last week, Twingly launched its search engine Twingly.com to track 30 million blogs all over the world.

Despite this global scope, Källström said Twingly will concentrate on being number one in Europe, working with several different European languages.

“Google has not improved its blog search for more than two years,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

The company has teamed up with newspapers in Spain, Portugal, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and South Africa, to show blog links to the news sites’ articles.

Källström added that his hope was for Twingly to be able to take on both Google and Technorati by providing more functionality and driving traffic to bloggers via its media partnerships.

“Media is more and more about the conversation between media and its readers. We see a very strong synergy between mainstream media and bloggers and try to provide a bridge that can improve this synergy,” he said.

Blogs have replaced docusoaps
Twingly’s target group for The Summer of Code will no doubt draw an audience of uber-geeks but a young Swedish reporter recently admitted she was addicted to a very different sort of ‘web docusoap’.

Madeleine Östlund, a reporter with the Swedish equivalent of Press Gazette, Dagens Media, claimed the country’s fashion blogs had replaced docusoaps (link in Swedish).

She confessed she found it increasingly difficult to live without her daily fix of intimate everyday details and gossip from the country’s high-profile fashion bloggers, a phenomenon Journalism.co.uk has described here.

“It is not their blogging about clothes that draws me in, rather it is the surprise and fascination with which I read about these young girls’ private lives. Surprise and fascination about how much they often reveal,” she wrote, citing posts about broken hearts, hospital stays, what they had for breakfast and descriptions of a caesarian birth.

Roll on the Web 2.0 docusoap about dashing media journalists, I say.