• by Shankar Gupta , July 8, 2005

Bloggers have long depended on mainstream media, linking to and critiquing established publications' online articles. Now, mainstream media is turning the tables.

Salon.com and America Online are among the companies that have recently started providing online readers with links to blogs that discuss specific stories via Technorati, a search engine that crawls the millions of sites that make up the blogosphere. Newsweek magazine is also in discussions with Technorati for this feature, according to a Newsweek spokeswoman. Salon.com added the Technorati links in mid-May, and the links appeared on AOL's official Live 8 page last weekend.

Technorati founder and CEO David Sifry said the development marks a major step in the media world's acceptance of Weblogs. "In the 20th century it was about letters to the editor; in the 21st century we're seeing people adding their commentary by blogging about the stories and articles," said Sifry. "There's definitely a symbiosis between bloggers and the mainstream media."

The links direct readers to a Technorati search using the URL of the story they were reading. The Technorati search engine returns a list of every blog containing a link to that URL, allowing the user to see what the blogosphere has to say about a given article. Technorati's searches, much like many search engines', are monetized via sponsored links tied to the search terms used.

Salon.com's vice president for technology, Kevin Cooke, said the online magazine instituted the links to satisfy user demand for commentary from the blogosphere, adding that Salon.com has always prided itself as being "avant-garde" when it comes to its relations with the blogging world. "Enough users were curious about what the blogosphere was saying about the articles that we're producing," Cooke said. "And Salon has a long history of being tied deeply to the blogosphere--we've had the Salon blogs in place for over two years now. It was just sort of a natural thing for us to do." Salon implemented the links in mid-May.

Sifry also said that by sending traffic to the bloggers from their own sites, news organizations encourage bloggers to link to them more often. "There's this really interesting feedback that we've observed: When bloggers notice that they're being noticed, they're more likely to blog and talk because they know that they're being heard," he said. "The blogs themselves start to act as a decentralized distribution medium for their stories."

Cooke concurred with Sifry's assessment, saying that Salon had seen increased chatter about their stories from the blogs.