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.
1 Comment
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)