Today Topix started indexing 15,000 blogs, announces CEO Rick Skrenta on their blog:

Others are doing a great job of providing relevant keyword search against blogs. But our mission is to discover the news within the sea of blog posts, and report them by location and subject. What we’re releasing today is our first step in connecting our readers to 15,000 more voices talking about the topics they care about.

They are blending the blogs with their 300,000 subject feeds and 30,000 local feeds. Note from the picture above they are highlighing blogs in a light tan background though Skrenta indicates this may not be a permanent situation. I’d like to see major news sites start including and linking to blogs. It is happening, but very slowly. Though I do see news on TV and hear via the radio, bloggers generate a lot of news.

The issue facing Topix is whether the blog post is news or not? Skrenta believes some 85-90% of the estimated 20 million blogs are spam and of the well ranked non-spam blogs they found that about 50% haven’t been updated in the last 60 days. Topix uses their patent pending NewsRank method to help determine what is news (emphasis mine):

The magnitude of the underlying story is derived from a combination of factors, including reporting source, number of articles appearing reporting on the story, how quickly those articles appear and the prominence of the subject matter of the story. Topix.net has a proclivity for hard news (as opposed to commentary) and there is an editorial voice built into our AI used to surface the most interesting stories to our users.

I find the emphasized part interesting because many blogs are commentary based. This one the format often employed is: news, reviews and muse, often in that order. I wonder if their algorithm looks for a lot of uses of the first person and penalizes a story based on that?

Anyway, it’s long past time to stop arguing about whether bloggers are journalists or not. News is news and if it comes from a professional news organization, the wire, TV, radio, a friend, associate, client or family member or, blogs, etc, it’s still news to me.

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Well done, Topix.

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