Two recent items of interest regarding News.com (and given that some of the folks from there stop by here regularly, hey guys – Happy Thanksgiving :):
1. News.com has turned on trackbacks for each story – which is very interesting. While others have commented on the fact that News.com is engaging in a more conversational discourse – which I also applaud – I think it’s a pretty savvy move for them.
Consider that when I’m writing up an entry here and need to cite a news source, I’ve very intentionally not favored any particular news source over another, because while we work with and very much respect the News.com guys (guys like Becker, Kanellos, LaMonica, Ricciuti, and Shankland), we also work with a host of other media outlets.
But by enabling trackbacks, News.com offers me the unique opportunity to attach, as it were, to their stories with my own view and opinion. So at least until their competitors do the same, I’ll probably be favoring News.com.
2. The News.com crew has also introduced Extra, a sort of human filtered aggregation or collection point for a variety of media points – including blogs. I’m still more of a blog person, but I can see this finding an audience amongst RSS-challenged execs, for example. But one question: according to Feedburner, Extra is crawling this space, which is fine as their bot is well behaved. But they’re doing nothing with the content here, near as I can determine. At the moment, they seem to be surfacing only the high traffic sites such as Gizmodo or Slashdot. But presumably they’re crawling here for a reason, so I’m interested to see what that reason is. I know that a News.com that included more individual blogs would give me another reason to visit.
