Does anybody know about this? We were doing some work on the internal political situation of a Middle Eastern country that we’ll allow to remain nameless for now, and starting getting all of these hits for Atlas Shrugs. Some quick checks show that they’re also tagging Jawa, Volokh, Joust The Facts, and Cobb. Off the political radar, they’ve got Gridskipper and the science blog Thoughts from Kansas.
We came up with these by doing a really quick check. In addition to some targeted searches, we basically we searched on “Allahpundit” to filter out all the nonblog sources (because you know that his name isn’t getting into most MSM papers… his name, if it appears, probably reads “a writer for the weblog Hot Air”). And obviously, we’re missing the left side of the blogosphere completely. But even with this really hackneyed search, the list of blogs they’re tagging seems really random (it looks like no Insta or LGF, but maybe we missed them). Also, they’re not tagging all posts – there are wide gaps for sure in the Gskip archives, and what we could get from Jawa seemed thin.
At first we thought that the selections were so random because Lexis had contacted individual bloggers to opt in or something. But Pamela says she has no idea when or how this happened, so that’s not what’s going on. Someone should follow up on this, given that it’s a major jump for the blogosphere into a domain that used to be exclusively reserved for MSM.
UPDATED – Drs. Shackleford and Volokh have both confirmed that they were contacted before their content was syndicated. Which means that Pamela is going to have to kill some people. Which is obviously going to be awesome.
Previously:
* A Neoconservative Manifesto?
* The Kerry Hack Job
* OneJerusalem.org Conference Call: Dick Morris – (1) Introduction
