BBC’s link love

Posted Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 8:23pm in Blogging  | 

The BBC has recently introduced a new element to the news section of its website which scrapes in (and links to) related content from external news sites. So, for example, if you click on the BBC article about the current oil tanker strikes, further down the page, on the right hand side you are given a list of related articles from other news websites. This particular article currently has links to related articles in the Sunday Mirror, Mirror and CNN among others.

Digital Inspiration is reporting that the BBC is using Moreover Technologies (Nick Denton’s old company) to automatically pull in related articles from over 4,000 external news sites. There is no human intervention in the process much like how Google News and Yahoo News both work.

The Beeb gives an explanation as to why they’ve introduced this new element to the site, and it’s a pretty good one, “Our users tell us that one of the things they value most about our service is our policy of linking openly to other websites. These links offer access to more detailed information, the chance to compare sources or check out a different perspective on the same story.”

Fair play to the BBC for linking out and effectively promoting the content of its competitors. One wonders if they are planning to include blogs in this process. Now that would give readers the opportunity to “check out a different perspective on the same story.”

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5 Comments

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links for 2008-06-19 « media mindshare: news media, technology & public relations

Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 2:37am

[...] BBC’s link love > PRBlogger.com Stephen Davies examines new element at BBC site — linkage to news on external sites. Posted in 874. [...]

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Ian Delaney

Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 4:32pm

Very interesting. I (and many others) have long criticised the BBC News site for failing to give credit to the blogosphere.

4000 sites seems an odd number. Are they being hand-vetted? And on what criteria, I wonder.

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Ian Delaney

Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 4:33pm

Ah - your picture has loaded now. I see there’s still nothing from blogs.

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Jem Stone (BBC)

Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 8:45am

Actually BBC News have had this feature for quite a while (2006 i think). There is a white label list of global news sources that help power the feature.There is also a degree of editorial intervention. (although its fairly light touch). A blog version of newstracker (its internal BBC name) is being tested.

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Stephen

Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 9:00am

Cheers Jem,

I wasn’t aware that BBC News has been linking out to external news articles for that long. Good stuff though.

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