It used to be that when a newspaper put out an “Extra” edition, it was filled with stories written by its reporters who had toiled away the night to cover some breaking news or collection of stories. Today, the New York Times is redefining “Extra” as stories written by others. It is turning on a new feature on its homepage called Times Extra that will start adding links from elsewhere underneath the headlines of its own articles. The related links are from other news sites and blogs (even the Wall Street Journal), with the source highlighted in green to differentiate them from the New York Times’ own stories.
As you can see from the screenshot, this adds a lot of unnecessary clutter on the page. (Don’t worry, it’s optional. That’s why they call it a beta). The links come from Blogrunner, the buzz aggregator the New York Times bought in 2006 2005. Blogrunner is a Techmeme competitor, except that it doesn’t really compete that well (see traffic chart below). → Read More
On Thursday we covered the official launch of the NY Times Blogrunner product. Blogrunner was specifically positioned as a Techmeme-like blog news aggregator, albeit with a human touch to help pick good stories when the algorithm isn’t quite up to the task (Techmeme is 100% algorithm based news). When we wrote that initial story we said we’d report back on how much traffic was referred to us from each of Blogrunner and Techmeme. It was a perfect day for us to test, because our story about MySpace joining Google OpenSocial was the top story on both sites for much of the day. We are not comparing apples to apples. While the same story was at the top of both sites, blogrunner is just a feature in the NY Times technology section, and at TechMeme it’s the whole show. But the fact that the NYTimes is so much bigger than TechMeme still made me suspect that overall traffic from them would be higher. September Comscore says the NY Times had 14.5 million unique visitors. TechMeme is too small to be counted by Comscore, so they probably had less than 500,000 unique visitors. Still, the difference is amazing. The NY Times sent us 150 visitors (and another 70 from blogrunner.com). But those 220 visitors are being compared to 4,500 visitors that TechMeme delivered during that same 24 hour period. So little of that massive traffic seems to be filtering down to the blog level from the NY Times. It could be due to placement, or perhaps the readers are not yet comfortable with blogrunner; perhaps it will grow on them over time. Until I see otherwise, TechMeme is the water cooler in the blogosphere. It’s the place we all go hang out to tell stories – some get the attention of everyone around while others are just whispered and no one hears a thing. But it is the place where we all are all the time. It’s going to be hard to hurt it much. → Read More
Last night, the New York Times quietly launched Blogrunner on the technology section of its main site. Blogrunner was one of many techmeme copycat sites, until the New York Times bought it last year. Like Techmeme, Blogrunner is a service that keeps track of the latest news and blog posts on a range of topics (Politics, Technology, Media, Business, Economy, Law, Health, Movies, Books, Religion, Iraq, Entertainment). Now those links are appearing on the New York Time’s main site, starting with the technology section, in a middle column titled “Technology Headlines from Around the Web.” It is also on the bottom-right of the Health section in a column called “Health Around the Web.” And links from Blogrunner will appear at the bottom of individual stories, giving readers a choice between related articles from the New York Times and related articles from around the Web (much like some sites use Sphere). Says New York Times editor (and Bits blogger) Saul Hansell: ” Unlike Google News and Techmeme, we aren’t trying to prove machines can be better editors than people. We have a hybrid model, with Web Crawlers and Editors both helping find and ranks posts.” But the NYT would like nothing better than to displace those two news crawlers. At first glance, it looks like it is Techmeme for a mainstream audience. TechCrunch happens to be at the top of both the NYT Blogrunner and Techmeme right now. It will be interesting to see which one delivers more traffic. We will report on the results tomorrow. (Update: Blogrunner is not killing anyone yet. Of all referring sites to TechCrunch yesterday and today up until 11 AM EST, Blogrunner is ranked a lowly 105—although we are no longer listed on the NYT Technology page. In contrast, Techmeme is our 30th largest referrer.) CrunchBase Information TechMeme Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
I’ve written about two new real-time news aggregators today, Megite and Newroo. The space is clearly hot, with both funded and unfunded companies rushing to release products. The goal? Leverage all of the great edge blog content out there, figure out what’s hot at any given time by analyzing who’s linking to who (as well as other tools) and presenting that hot content to users. It’s not easy to define this space. In general, I think the services that are focusing mostly on blog links are turning up the best stuff. Many of the services that Paul Montgomery listed in a post earlier this week don’t do this…they rely on user voting or other algorithms to determine relevance. My list is below. These sites either use incoming links or story clusters (or both) to determine relevance, and show the linking/discussing blogs. I have written about many of these separately already. The others I will write about in the future if their features are or become interesting. The List: Blogniscient Blogrunner Blogsnow Chuquet Megite Memeorandum Newroo (pre-launch) Tailrank Technorati Kitchen Tinfinger (pre-launch) Topix.net TruthLaidBear The best? Still Memeorandum, but I love the experiments being tried by other services. And something else: these services are going to start getting acquired by the big guys, if only for the brilliance of the engineering work behind the engines. Update: And for more on Memeorandum and this space, listen to yesterday’s Gillmor Gang, which had a guest appearance by Gabe. → Read More
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