links for 2009-04-30

"Set against that is my continuing conviction that this stuff is important and will, at some point down the road, become very, very big indeed. Someone somehow is going to find a way of combining the power of dozens and hundreds of passionate local bloggers and publishing their narratives in ways which are compelling and sustainable."

Chris links out to 26 different online resources tracking swine flu and displaying the data in varying ways. Not one of them is from a newspaper.

"In a real world data sample I just looked at, of almost 17,000 pages only about 5.5% used nofollow of any type for the links I checked. 15 pages used a meta robots nofollow tag and only one used the X-Robots-Tag http header. Yet if you look at just blog comments, the percentage is going to be high". Very in-depth piece of research here.

"The Google News Blog announced they have joined Twitter to automatically post links to top stories on Twitter via @GoogleNews. Many news sites automatically post stories to Twitter as well, but Google News recently started to do this as well. I believe Google News also powers @News_By_Robots, but I do not have official conformation on this."

"Google does have plans for a solution. In about six months, the company will roll out a system that will bring high-quality news content to users without them actively looking for it. Under this latest iteration of advanced search, users will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them just by calling up Google’s page. The latest algorithms apply ever more sophisticated filtering – based on search words, user choices, purchases, a whole host of cues – to determine what the reader is looking for without knowing they’re looking for it."