Am I on the Wall Street Journal website?!
I was looking through my blog stats today and spotted that I had a few referals from http://onespot.wsj.com/health/2009/01/29/270945597-health-bloggers-bite-back-as. Check it:
Yup, it looks like The Wall Street Journal website has aggregated the blog post I wrote this week about the Wellsphere kerfuffle.
A quick bit of research and I have discovered that OneSpot.com is a blog aggregator and filter that WSJ.com uses to beef out their website with third-party content. Here’s the blurb:
WSJ.com uses OneSpot to find and deliver these headlines and links. To get the list, OneSpot identifies the active members of the health content community by analyzing a set of sources provided by the WSJ editorial staff. OneSpot matches them to thousands of other related sources from around the Web. By continuously monitoring these sites and outbound links, OneSpot generates a list of popular health stories.
I can’t find a complete list of which other blogs WSJ is aggregating, but a quick look at http://onespot.wsj.com/health/ shows that the content of blogging contemporaries of mine such as Medgadget and The Happy Hospitalist is being rated as worthy of inclusion as that of big-name news sites like BBC Health and New York Times Health.
I feel like my blog is really starting to take off recently and this kind of encouraging coverage makes me want to post as often as I can. Big self-congratulatory pat on the back for me. Well, not too big – I’m feeling pretty pukey this evening. I believe an Australian has poisoned me with chicken nuggets. Not as some kind of post-colonial revenge, but due to poor oven operating skills. I’m going to go to bed. Or throw up. Or throw up then go to bed. Emphatically not go to bed then throw up.
Less self-absorbed posting will continue on Monday. Have a good weekend folks!
P.S. Of course, the difference between this kind of blog aggregation and what Wellsphere is doing is that WSJ.com readers get directed to my website to read the full post. I get exposure on a well-known website AND the website traffic? This is the kind of deal Wellsphere should have cut.
February 2nd, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Helen,
Thanks for the quick link and mini-review!
OneSpot aggregates, filters, and prioritizes the content from hundreds of thousands of blogs and mainstream media sites – this includes thousands of great health sites, including yours. The Web’s top content can increasingly come from anywhere; while major sites frequently break the big stories, smaller sites do as well, and the best ones provide a unique perspective for their target audience.
Our goal is to model the way we treat bloggers on the way they treat each other – when a blogger quotes someone, they give a short snippet and link back to the original source. My friend Jeff Jarvis of buzzmachine.com calls this the ethic of the link: “We believe one of our key jobs is to link our public to other voices and to source material so they may judge themselves”.
This benefits both parties – the linking site serves their audience by finding and pointing out to their readers the best content – no matter where it comes from – and the linked-to site gets greater exposure (and traffic), and an opportunity to convert the new visitor into a regular reader.
Matt (Founder, OneSpot)
October 13th, 2011 at 3:34 am
uhmmm this is no benefit.
this is the WSJ link farming. it is not ‘win win’, it is ‘stupid stupid’. its like sticking your newspaper inside a bathroom stall, its a gimmick so that some ivy league douchebag can claim he improved numbers by 4 percent and pay himself a fat bonus, fill out his CV, and move on to greener pastures before anyone figures out that link farming is not a stable revenue stream, nor is it any kind of legitimate business activity.
its a bunch of robots copy/pasting content and spraying it all over your website so that search engines will accidentally take morons there who dont realize where they are going.
the only reason these ‘results’ show up in a search engine is because the ‘parent’ company (wsj.com) in this case has a good reputation in the search engine to begin with. after a few months/years of whoring their good name out like this for some tiny pittance of revenue, the search engines will figure out this idiotic copy/paste game and then downrank these shitty linkfarms just like they do every other shitty linkfarm.
think about it. Google has an entire army of people whose sole purpose in life is to figure out when sites do brainless, robotic crap like this, and then to downrank it. there is no legitimate reason for someone searching for ‘carrot soup recipe’ to go to the WSJ copy-pasted linkfarm version of the story, instead of the original story on the original blog.
this is just another example of the financialization of everything once sacred and holy in our country. the wall street journal, while it drove liberals crazy with its editorials, has been a bastion of excellent, insightful journalism for decades. now, it is dying. it is being taken over by link spammers. this is not progress, this is the looting of america by the financial class to line their own pockets.