By: Jay DeFoore Topix.net, the news aggregator that counts Knight Ridder, Gannett, and Tribune among its owners, has added 15,000 weblogs to the sites it serves up in its search results.
The news was announced on, what else, Topix.net's
corporate blog.
"Our mission is to discover the news within the sea of blog posts, and report them by location and subject," explained the post. "What we're releasing today is our first step in connecting our readers to 15,000 more voices talking about the topics they care about."
Of particular note to newspapers is Topix.net's graphical breakdown illustrating the differing amount of coverage blogs and mainstream media outlets devote to particular topics. For example, Topix.net's figures show that 13% of the blog posts it has indexed cover technology, while just 2% of mainstream media articles address tech issues. Similarly, a greater proportion of blog posts deal with business (16%), entertainment (14%) and life (12%).
While we aren't suggesting that news outlets alter their content, perhaps they could benefit by putting additional resources on the most popular topics blogs do well.
In identifying the areas where "bloggers really add to the experience," the Topix.net team points to such channels as fast food, photography, poker, electronic music, Apple computer, and search engine news, among others.
To arrive at the admittedly arbitrary 15,000 number, Topix.net explained that its crawling technology indexed close to 1 million blogs. The end result was achieved by ranking those blogs with algorithms that consider a variety of factors such as posting frequency, writing style, type of reference, and popularity.
Topix.net also added context to the wildly varying reports that the blogging revolution has resulted in somewhere between 20 million and 100 million weblogs. "While the total number of unique feeds that have ever existed, or blogging accounts that have ever been signed up can certainly be counted, what is far more relevant to us is the composition of the daily posting stream," the site explained. "What we're seeing is that 85-90% of the daily posts hitting ping services such as weblogs.com are spam (take a look for yourself). Of well-ranked non-spam blogs that we've discovered, we've found about half haven't been updated in the past 60 days. Our filters sift through what's left, which even after discarding 95%, is still a great deal of good material."
In other Topix.net news, the company last month started offering contextually targeted headline "modules" to its publishing partners. Users who click on the headlines proceed either to a co-branded site or to one of Topix.net's 300,000 category pages. Topix.net will then share a percentage of the resulting pay-per-click ad revenue with the publisher.
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