Quick Hits

Fishing With Linkbait

By C. Max Magee posted at 3:07 pm on June 1, 2006 3

Just as I (and several others) suspected! The New York Times piece on the best novels of the last 25 years was just a ploy to get mentioned on blogs. By way of proof, check out what I found in the traffic logs for The Millions today:

Time/Date: Thu_Jun__1_13:09:16_2006_DST
Visitor IP: nytgate05.nytimes.com
Referred by: www.technorati.com/search/www.nytimes.com/
2006/05/21/books/fiction-25-years.html

Seriously, I think it’s great that folks at the Times read blogs, and I’m glad they care that bloggers read the Times, but it seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to get mentioned by us.

(For those of you unfamiliar with traffic logs, the above basically means that someone at the Times arrived at The Millions after checking Technorati to see which blogs referenced its 25 best books story.)

Update: Well, I figured out why the Times was wondering what I wrote about their list. They were putting together this page. So kudos to the Times for acknowledging that this list was the start of a conversation and not a decree and for being willing to host some of the resulting conversation on its site. I’d love to see more of this in the future.



  


Share this article

More from the Millions

3 Responses to “Fishing With Linkbait”

  1. Phil W
    at 7:24 pm on June 1, 2006

    I don't know. I've gotten referral links from the NY Times that came from feedreader pages on their site. http://www.nytimes.com/gst/mostpopular.html Here's a page that lists which of their articles have been linked to most often by blogs. I don't think they would need Technorati.

  2. Max
    at 5:53 am on June 2, 2006

    You're right, Phil, and I was mostly kidding. The larger point I'm making is that the Times list really served no purpose other than to manufacture something for people to talk about – PR essentially. Thanks fot the link, I hadn't seen the Times "popular" page before.

  3. Phil W
    at 7:09 pm on June 6, 2006

    I think this article vindicates you entirely. Even though you were half-joking, you were right about the NYT all along.

Post a Response

Comments with unrelated links will be deleted. If you'd like to reach our readers, consider buying an advertisement instead.

Anonymous and pseudonymous comments that do not add to the conversation will be deleted at our discretion.