Technology Evangelist

Should blogs be included in Google News? That's not an easy question to answer with a simple yes or no. The content of any given blog will likely have a huge bearing on your opinion, right?

At approximately 7:26pm CDT today, Google News added Technology Evangelist to their syndicated news sources. I say approximately, as I am basing this estimate on our first visitor to the site from Google News on a search for the term [goog]. A fitting search considering Google announced their earnings after the market closed today. We quickly disappeared from the top results for that term due to the deluge of news on GOOG tonight. Clearly, other sites have better content to offer Google News readers tonight on this subject than what we've posted here.

Here's a screen shot from Google News for the search [yahoo] tonight:
Technology Evangelist on Google News

TechnologyEvangelist.com is the 2nd story on the page.

Does Google News deliver traffic? Here is a snapshot of our hourly page views for today:

I grabbed this data early into the 10 o'clock hour.

Now that this blog is listed on Google News, what do you think my stance is on the "Should blogs be on Google News" debate? Clearly, yes they should be IF they're creating newsworthy content.

What qualifies as newsworthy content? That's really a question for Google, but in my opinion, most news and commentary on news should qualify for Google News syndication. How much visibility a particular story receives should be decided based on some kind of credibility metric. For example, the Wall Street Journal's coverage of GOOG tonight should probably outrank Technology Evangelist's.

Rather than getting to be bottom of the inclusiveness issue, I've put together a list of blog categories that I don't consider Google News-worthy:

Personal Diaries
Daily Porn Links
Reblogs: Blogs that aggregate news stories they found on other sites, but don't create any original content
Fiction Blogs

What am I missing? Add additional non-Google News-worthy blog categories to the comments, or tell me what's wrong with my list.

PS: Traffick's analysis of Google's quarterly report is worth a read.

One side effect of Google News: Our site's content gets syndicated onto many more splogs. Subscribing to a blogsearch.google.com feed for the term "technology evangelist" generates a lot of junk from blog sites that are scraping Google News results.

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