Comments on: How The Boston Globe Could Improve Their Website

By: links for 2008-06-29 « Joanna Geary

links for 2008-06-29 « Joanna Geary — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:34:05 +0000

[...] How The Boston Globe Could Improve Their Website | chrisbrogan.com This is the Internet’s version of “If a tree falls.” According to my log traffic, the Boston Globe is less impacting of my blog than Twitter. (tags: linking, journalism,) [...]

By: Jen

Jen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:36:26 +0000

It’s unfortunate they didn’t link out. However, in the future they may improve their website readership with some pretty cool statistical copywriting software called Glyphius. This might help create better link management control as well.

By: Kai

Kai — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:34:33 +0000

@Steve – It would be nice if newspapers treated thier sites as ‘wikis’ and let anyone with the technical knowhow on their staff post the corrections – because then you’d have the transparency of seeing where the correction was – the control that it wasn’t ‘just anyone’ changing it (i.e a member of staff) and the internal linking ‘fun’ that we should always get when dealing with wikis.
There again, I’ve always been more than a little hardcore about adopting tech at the drop of a hat ;)

By: lawton chiles

lawton chiles — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:33:15 +0000

While I don’t understand a lot of the nofollow stuff, it seems to me that this is a little bit of old-media thinking by the Globe. They aren’t the Boston news standard, at least not for long, as we move into consumer-generated media. I think the more relevant and helpful they can be, the better it is for them

By: Scott Kirsner

Scott Kirsner — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:49:51 +0000

Tripp – you’ve hit the nail on the head. The parsing software isn’t exceptionally good at recognizing links. It’s a problem that needs to be fixed, in my opinion, not a conspiracy not to link out from Boston.com.

I would argue that, while it’s not ideal, some users *do* know how to cut and paste URLs into the address line and may be finding Chris’ blog that way.

Scott

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:33:17 +0000

Lawton – That’s a possibility.

Josh Klein – If anything, post the links and then give them a rel=”nofollow”…with a target=”_blank” for offsite links.

Then again, many MSM sources don’t have a dedicated SEO person.

By: steve Garfield

steve Garfield — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:27:13 +0000

@Kai – You bring up a good point which also reminds me of another problem that newspapers have. When they make a mistake, the archived version of hte story s not changed, a correction is posted in another place, and hte incorrect information lives on, being searchable by Google forever….

I’d love to hear that this is getting corrected…

By: Why I’m ressurecting the ‘link journalism’ argument : ArdentWriter

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:59:01 +0000

[...] changing the way the internet works, and as an added bonus, we can track who is doing it too. As Chris Brogan points out – the Boston Globe are losing all of their ‘credit’ for linking to him – and eventually, [...]

By: Kai

Kai — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:54:54 +0000

I went on a rant about this years ago – at the time it was motivated by the fact that certain big news sites ‘move’ content, or delete it. What’s the point of offering news to the WWW, if they aren’t willing to archive it – and what’s the point of encouraging people to link and share if they don’t want to use the power they are asking for?
I think it’s something that we – as bloggers and writers – need to address before the newspapers fall into line.

By: Ben Kunz

Ben Kunz — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:33:00 +0000

Slate.com recently wrote a piece on why newspapers don’t want to link to other sites. Why give away traffic? You might like it. http://www.slate.com/id/2188011/