The New York Times Algorithm Features Our Blog (Again)

The New York Times featured our recent blog post about a user-created Google map of the swine flu on its Times Topics page (see below, in the center of the screenshot).



This is part of the NYT news aggregator Headlines Around the Web (Blogrunner) which monitors about 12,000 blogs and media sources.

It is not a big deal but still nice to share real estate on the page of one of the most popular newspapers in the world with a breaking news post. This is an automatic inclusion by an algorithm and we used it as an example how blogs have gradually gained some relevance in the eyes of the mainstream media. It has happened on a few occasions in the past and the visitor traffic implications were not significant. Google still leads by a large margin among the traffic sources.

References:
Map of H1N1 Swine Flu of 2009