BBC Newstracker - new news, old news, or just plain borked?
Aug 1st, 2008 by handolio
As regular reader(s) will know, I read BBC News Online a fair bit. Even so, I’ve never noticed this before. I’m slightly embarrassed that it’s in such a story of prurient interest, but there you go.
So, searching the Beeb for Newstracker reveals that, at least in theory, this has been running since 2004. It’s seemingly hardly been used until the last month or so, when it’s started to appear in the side bar on a few stories. Clicking any of the links serves up the BBC’s 404 page, though.
Now I think about it, I seem to remember a time not so long ago when the BBC served up active links to other news sources in the right-hand pane. Maybe I’m misremembering, but I know that someone was doing it, and who more likely than the publicly-funded Beeb?
I was going to write ‘less commercially-minded’, but perhaps one of the downsides to an increased awareness of SEO among news sites is that they now better understand the value of an outgoing link, and are less inclined to use them freely. Even the BBC, which can’t make money out of them.
