Trying your hand at link journalism

For your next blog post, I would like you to round up what five Boston-area bloggers are saying about a topic in the news. The topic may be anything of your choice, local, national or international. But as we learned in class, finding local blogs is not always easy.

Please write about 350 words, and post your item by the end of the day on Friday. Sunday. (Let’s all catch our breath. If you need the weekend to do this, that’s fine.)

We ran through the tools that you’ll use very quickly, so let me explain them again here. The best way to organize any Web content to which you wish to return later is via Delicious, the original (I think) social-bookmarking site. If you haven’t done so yet, please register and make use of it.

You can tag content any way you like. You can also see what other people have linked to, and who else has linked to the content you have saved. (That’s why it’s called a social-bookmarking site.) This can be quite useful for finding content you might have otherwise missed. For instance, if you link to an obscure report on the radiation hazards of cell phones and see that five other people have linked to it too, you can learn what else they’ve linked to — which may very well include related topics.

How do you find blog posts on a particular subject? The blog-search engine of choice is probably Google Blog Search, which works exactly like Google. It can be a little frustrating to use, though, because there are so many blogs out there. You’ll need to form an extremely specific search to get a list of links narrow enough to be manageable.

If you are looking for what Boston-area bloggers are saying about a local news story, Google Blog Search might fill your needs. After all, bloggers outside the Boston area probably wouldn’t be saying anything about it. But your assignment might be (for instance) to find out what local bloggers are saying about Sarah Palin, gasoline prices or the final days of Yankee Stadium.

There are two methods for doing this, and we can thank Adam Gaffin, the founder of Universal Hub, for both of them. Universal Hub, as you probably know, is a “best of the Boston blogs” site, compiled by Gaffin and informed by his sensibility. You can search Universal Hub either on-site or externally, through Google. Here’s how you would form a Google search of Universal Hub posts concerning Katie Couric’s interviews with Sarah Palin:

"Sarah Palin" "Katie Couric" site:universalhub.com

Remember, Universal Hub posts are merely summaries. Be sure to click through to the original blog post. And if you choose to include it in your write-up, link to the permalink, which is usually (but not always) the headline of the post. You want to make sure that readers can return to the content you’re linking to long after it has slid off the front page.

Now, the problem with what I have just described is that you’re stuck with Gaffin’s choices as to what’s worthwhile and what isn’t. Fortunately, Gaffin also runs a project called Boston Blogs, an automatic feed of more than 1,000 Boston-area blogs. You only get the headline and the first five and a half lines of an item, but that should be enough to do a search. If you do an external Google search, it works exactly the same way as it does with Universal Hub:

"Sarah Palin" "Katie Couric" site:bostonblogs.com

Again, make sure you click through to the original blog post.

Finally, I want you to tell me how much “authority” each blog that you cite has, according to Technorati. Let’s say you wanted to cite Blue Mass. Group, a liberal, Boston-area political blog. Go to Technorati and enter bluemassgroup.com in the search engine in the upper right. Now, in the upper left, you will see “Authority: 195.” What that means is 195 blogs linked to Blue Mass. Group over the past six months. That’s pretty good. You can certainly cite a blog to which only a tiny handful of blogs linked, but you want to aim for blogs with as much authority as possible.

For each of the five posts you write about, please cite the Technorati authority figure. For instance, you might write the following:

Even some local bloggers who support the financial bailout couldn’t suppress their pleasure over Congress’ defeat of the measure on Monday. “There’s a part of me that respects and finds refreshing the rejection of the Wall Street bailout plan,” says Hub Blog (Technorati authority: 31), though Mr. Hub hopes the bill passes soon.

Note that I linked to the permalink (not all that easy to find on Hub Blog; it’s the time of day.

For an extended example of link journalism, please take a look at my most recent column for the Guardian, on media reaction to the first presidential debate. I make no great claims for it except for the number of sources I was able to pull in, mixing links, quotes and my own commentary. What I like best about it is that it wouldn’t work nearly as well in print.