According to a new index published by Technorati, the New York Times is the second most linked to site by bloggers. Unsurprising you might think, given their news and opinion driven content. But it may just be that this is as much the result of a interesting programme of change being spearheaded by the Interactive Newsroom Technologies group in the Times – a group of "developers-slash-journalists, or journalists-slash-developers" who work across a broad scope of the organisation on both short-term and long-term projects to evolve and reinvent.
Part of what they're doing is about the kind of social optimisation I talked about below. Layers of interactivity, involvement, share-ability. Part of it is about a new kind of journalism. New ways of reporting and representing news and information. Data visualisations. Backstories. Generating talkability by reflecting back to the audience what we are all talking about, or how we feel. The benefit of all this is obvious – talkability, spreadable media, link generation, SEO benefit. It's very smart.
One in 8 million is yet another great example. A storytelling project reflecting the fact that New York is a "305-square-mile parade of people with something to say". A collection of "passions and problems, relationships and routines, vocations and obsessions". I love this sort of stuff. It's exactly what they should be doing. And look at that. I've just linked to the New York Times again.
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