Addicted to check your blog stats? I am. Stats on Wordpress don’t just tell you how many hits you’ve gotten but where they come from. Recently there have been some hits from a source I didn’t recognize, Outside.in.

Tracking back to the Outside.in site, it was plain that The Broad Brush blog was being aggregated there, along with others from St. Louis. Checking the FAQ revealed that bloggers opt in. I’d never opted in The Broad Brush blog.

The site did provide an easy to locate link for contacting them. I requested to have the blog removed. Outside.in representative, Esther, has already gotten back to me. Let’s see what she says.

Hi Todd,

We automatically scan RSS feeds of great local bloggers and show only the headline and first 200 words of the story – with the intent of driving traffic to the blogger. We’ve sent you 27
visits since the beginning of November from the Outside.in core site and our Neighborhood News page on STLToday:

http://www.stltoday.com/neighborhoodnews

We’re working on removing your feed from our system now, and once it’s removed, we and STLToday will no longer be sending you traffic. I’ll let you know when your stories and links are down.

If you change your mind and decide you’d like to continue receiving traffic from us and STLToday, please let me know.

All the best,
Esther

The tone, to me, is very off-putting. It sounds like they were doing the blog a favor by including it in the automatic aggregation. There is something more irksome to me though, the part about STLToday.

STLToday is the St. Louis Post Dispatch online version. In recent years the Post has tried several channels to aggregate St. Louis blogs into the STLToday site as content.  This is an effort to steal the search engine juice from the blog posts and avoid spending time and money creating content. Several St. Louis bloggers argued against this practice, including me. It seems they’ve found another way to do it.

Interestingly, Outside.in, makes no mention on their site about affiliation with STLToday.

Rant off for now. Cheers and heads up out there.

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

Google has finally ‘officially’ begun indexing Twitter. It’s about time.

As an avid Twitter user for years now, I’m glad to see this happen. Many things are now being shared only on Twitter. It’s a high speed, low bandwidth window on your world and the worlds of your neighbors. Everyday I see links and information shared on Twitter that will never make it to a blog or otherwise indexed page.

There is always a downside.  Now more than ever what you say anywhere will be attached to you. Thought you were lost in the crowd on Twitter? No more.  Google and other search engines will soon be making available that crude tweet you sent about your barber, ex, or that sleezy politician.

The upside? Those obscure links to your blog will now be counted. You’ll know be able to find tidbits about your favorite town or restaurant as well.  And for those addicted to p0rn, yes, it’ll get even easier.

Will this indexing ultimately change your life? Not likely. Just be aware that your stalker’s job just got easier.

@tojosan