Technorati, the service that monitors blogs and tells them whether they’re cool or not, has released a list of the 50 media websites bloggers link to the most. (Via TechCrunch)
YouTube, unsurprisingly, tops the list, followed by the New York Times, BBC and CNN.
The only Canadian media outlet on the list is CBC.ca, coming in at #37. This is unsurprising since CBC has been investing in its Internet sites longer than the private media, and it has national television, radio and Internet sites to fuel its news-gathering operation. Plus it has dozens of RSS feeds sorted by topic, an iPhone version of its website (and separate mobile version), it’s got Twitter, and it has a news ticker people can add to their blogs.
I also like the fact that news stories (which are all open to comments) use Technorati to link to blogs that link back to those stories, which drives (some) traffic to those blogs and makes them (slightly) more likely to link to CBC than another website with the same story.
If other Canadian online news outlets want to match that, they should start copying some of those features.
CBC’s comment forums greatly degrade their web content. Way to show the world how racist, bigoted, and illiterate Canadians behave.
I am indifferent toward the Technorati pingbacks, but find them sophomoric and distracting in general.
A little dignity, if you will.
I agree entirely with comments needing to go away from cbc.ca. Commenting on a general news site is pointless as there is no general interest holding all the different opinions together (such as one would find with a blog or magazine website). As a result, most of the commenters are just blowhards with nothing better to do obsessed with having everyone hearing their opinion on even the most trivial of topics. Furthermore, cbc.ca has so many readers and thus so many commenters that once a comment is posted, it may be off the front page within seconds and buried in the rest of the comments within minutes. The necessary bandwidth to facilitate the extra traffic and uploading of comments and the necessity of hiring moderators I’m sure is a colossal waste of money that could be spent much better by the CBC!