Blogs and Libel - or Damn, NKK!

A piece of news from Topix, that they are adding blogs to their mix. It's an interesting topic, as they do not ask if blogs are news, but if all blog posts are newsworthy. And, it is a good subject to debate, but one for a future date for more journalistically inclined people than me.

But, this one part of the post that came up for me was

How did we judge which blogs to add? We started by crawling about 1M blogs, and then began automatically filtering and ranking these using our NewsRank algorithms -- which consider a variety of factors, such as blog posting frequency, writing style, type of reference, popularity, and so forth. We ended up adding the top 15,000 sources that passed these tests.

This seems arbitrary, but I could not comment on the post because there's no trackback or commenting. Seems like a cardinal rule that certain people have touted has been broken, but that rule must depend on the day of the week.

I am about to hit submit on a letter to them - the same way you ask them to add your blog is just the generic feedback form that goes who-only-knows where.

How did you choose the new blogs to add to Topix? What blogs were added? Why were they chosen - what were the criteria?

I noticed certain blogs had been added a long time ago. What blogs were added, and why? Have you used any reports on adding blogs, such as the report from Edelman and Intelliseek, which did rank blogs, or Technorati, which has it's ranking services?

If I did want to be added, what are the criteria to be accepted? Who is on that committee?

I wait with anticipation to get the answers, but I have other questions that might be too hard hitting, such as:

• How frequent does a blog have to be updated to be added?
• What is 'writing style'?
• What does reference mean?
• What do you mean ... number of links put in a post, or number of times a blog is referenced by others?
• What is popularity? Whose judgement on popularity?
  

While I have yet to say much about the different surveys out there - Edelman's, Guidewire Group's - at least we have some idea on how they went about things. Here? Well, for all I know it was a room full of trained monkeys.

I hope Topix releases the list of blogs, by locale and category, so we have an idea on who they judge worthy. But, I have a feeling they won't. Nheh, I'll still go to their site for a cheap way to track news and clients.

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