Ben Metcalfe

BBC News 3rd most linked to News source in blogs

Jeremy Zawodny (of Yahoo!) has referenced an Intelliseek investigation into the most popular News-related links from blogs.

It turns out that BBC News is the third most linked to News source from blogs after Yahoo! News (205,093 citations) and NY Times (188,596). The BBC got 161,805. This is from a sample of the top 100 blogs on the Interent.

(2005 is going to be a big year for RSS and the BBC, particularly the BBC News website. I know there’s some announcements coming, which I think everyone will enjoy, in due course… Watch this space!)

In the meantime, I’m going to start thinking about what the NY Times and Yahoo! News have that BBC don’t that makes them more blog-friendly. Most immediate and obvious blog-related citation issue is permalinks (which Yahoo! News is not the best at). BBC News website has been using permalinks since, well before the concept of a permalink was even thought about, since the start of the site in fact (you can see one of the first ever published stories – #85, written on Nov 3 1997 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/20085.stm – there are now over 2 million stories written).

If you have any views on citations and blogs, please let me know via the comments option on this entry (some of the folk at BBC News Technical Team have been known to subscribe to this blog!)